This is Part 2 in a 7-part series about world poker champion and cognitive scientist Annie Duke, PhD., whose insights follow each question below. To read from the start of the series, see Part 1.
Jenny Grant Rankin: There’s a lot of talk about the importance of games for children because they teach them good sportsmanship, but you make a compelling case that games are important to help us better understand life.
Annie Duke: Yes, even a game like Candyland has the influence of luck. Different games have different levels of this. With a game like chess, I can see the pieces on the board, so that reduces the amount of hidden information, and there are no dice involved, so that reduces the influence of luck. But even chess holds uncertainty because I don’t know exactly what you’re thinking or what you’re going to do. I have some theory of mind, and I can kind of guess based on your past history, but I don’t know what openings you’ve been studying, or whether you’re going to see a particular setup that I’m trying to do, or other things that I really don’t have control over.
You can see a sliding scale across things you do in life that has to do with how much luck is involved, which is also related to how much information you have at hand. That toggles with how much skill is in the short run. While poker is a skill game, it is very much determined by luck, and that resemblance to real life makes these types of games really interesting teaching tools. You have to learn that how it turns out one time is not particularly indicative of how things are going to turn out in the long run. Just because you won a hand doesn’t mean you played it well.
JGR: How does this relate to what we teach kids about making decisions?
AD: Children are trying to get a sense that they actually have quite a bit of control in life, yet there’s a lot of value in saying, “Yes, I think you have a lot of control in the long run, but you have to also acknowledge that things that happen—good or bad—are not solely the result of the decisions that you made.” They can’t possibly be, because we’re mostly not playing chess, which hinges more on skill than luck. We’re playing something different.
The best games involve those two things that life also involves: There’s much we don’t know, and the outcome of our decisions is influenced by luck. Even in a board game like Life, you have to spin the spinner, and there are cards that are faced down. When you look at how your life turns out, there is a very strong influence of luck, but there’s also an influence of skill. Are you going to delay gratification and go the college route? Because on average, you will have better outcomes with that route, as opposed to bypassing that in order to get to the money faster. But nothing is guaranteed.
We Can’t Judge Decisions Solely by Their Outcomes
JGR: Why can’t we use outcomes to judge the quality of our decisions?
AD: When you think about outcomes in your own life, they don’t rely on just luck or just skill. Just because you did really well doesn’t mean you worked harder than another person. The luck influence is much higher than 50%.
If I look at my life, I was born at a time when the paths for women were very different than they would have been 50 years earlier, or 100 years earlier, or 200 years earlier. I was born in America, I was born to two parents who were college-educated, and my dad worked at a fancy prep school that I got to go to for free. That then got me into an Ivy League school, and then another Ivy League school.… There are so many things that are core to our existence that we really had no control over.
Obviously, there is some skill element: I had to do well at the fancy prep school, I had to do well at the first college that I went to, and I had to do well in graduate school. I’m not being overly humble here. But the time when I was born, where I was born, to what parents, and what genetics I got in terms of my intelligence and my temperament, those are all luck-based.
When you think about the “Big 5” OCEAN personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism), they come more from nature than nurture, and all these things correlate closely with success. As individuals, we also have to recognize what we didn’t have much to do with. I’ve hit a lot of lotteries in my life, and that’s OK to recognize, because when you have those opportunities that present themselves due to luck, you still have to work really hard to make the best of them. And there are still people who have the same opportunities that you do who work really hard, but they just aren’t in the right place at the right time.
JGR: That awareness of luck’s role in our decisions breeds gratitude, which breeds happiness and breeds giving back to the world. I think that’s a great mindset to have.
AD: Yeah, I could think about it as a great mindset to have. I very much believe that you should try to figure out what’s true when you’re thinking about repeatability and what your expectations are for how things are supposed to go in the future. If you don’t objectively figure out the distribution of what is luck versus what is skill, then that’s going to negatively impact the kinds of decisions that you make in the future. I would rather get somewhere close to the truth, while acknowledging that I’m probably still deluding myself in some ways so that I feel good about myself.
Look for Part 3 in this 7-part series.
