To act or do nothing, that is the (other important) question

I read this morning an interesting article in Le Monde - New York Times Section. In summary, it presents a quick overview of some recent studies of preferences for action or inaction when situations arise, their impact on success and self-worth, and what may cause such a preference.

The text was informative, but one could have hoped the argumentation and supportive data would be more compelling. For one thing, one doesn’t need a PhD to figure out that people will tend to prefer action if action led them to success in the past, and conversely will stay put if this proved wise before. More importantly, the article should have pinpointed the incomplete view of the main theory presented:

the importance of time and timing
the discontinuity in the likeliness of outcomes
the importance continuous learning

As far as time and timing, two aspects are at play here: the time you have to make the decision and act, but also your timing - that is, when you make your decision and act on it. In many situations, being right too late is much worse than being wrong early. Then, action is better than inaction (see next point on discontinuity of outcomes). In many other situations, making the wrong move is altogether irreparable, and waiting a little bit rather than acting foolishly may save a lot of frustration. Examples abound in both case. When the priest asks at a wedding “Speak or remain silent forever”, you may want to remain silent at this point - for everyone’s sake please do not take it literally. Now, if you really have a point to share, you may have wanted to do so in the first place, some time before everybody was sitting in the pews, which leads us to timing.My mentor and I met in November in Las Vegas. At that time, he told me: “put your portfolio in cash, we’re heading for trouble”. At that time, the decision to sell was a good one. To do the same end of January would have been foolish.

Another point was the discontinuity in the likeliness of outcomes. In simple words, there are mistakes you can correct, and others you can’t. When it’s reparable, a bias for action will lead you further, because you can always try again or correct the course. When a mistake is irreparable, a bias for inaction may or may not be a good thing. The only thing we know for sure is that foolish action won’t get you far then. Let’s explore the example of the goalkeeper under this light, since the very physics of the situation lead to irreparable consequences. When a penalty is kicked, the goalkeeper has but a second to move towards the ball and catch it. If the ball has an effect, it may take a split second to see where the ball is going to go. Anyone who has seen the size of the goals these days could understand that you would need to be Spiderman to have the time to see where the ball will go, verify your first insight, ponder and then jump. I will need to look further to find studies on the subject, to include all the aspects at play: statistics of where the ball is going, statistics of the chance to catch the ball if you wait and see first vs. jump on one side, which is an acquired knowledge or experience that the researchers did not take into account… but in brief, the contextual elements suggest that if a goalkeeper jumps immediately on one side, he is taking a chance to catch it, if he doesn’t he may not have the time to do anything. Who would stay put with these terms?

Finally, having been a trainer and change management consultant for so many years, I must highlight the importance of learning. Bias for inaction won’t get you anywhere, as far as learning is concerned. On the other hand, as per the very common coaching quote, “Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect.” Bias for inaction will not allow you to acquire skills, and a bias for action without guidance will cripple you with permanent bad habits and scars.

This does not remove the validity of the theory, in the right context. It probably applies well to economic decisions such as the sale or conservation of a stock portfolio. If you are not convinced, I could give you another even more lame example, where the bias for action would be even bigger: when falling from an airplane

At the end of the day, a more comprehensive summary on the topic is: when informed, timely, reasoned, calm action is better than uninformed, emotional, erratic action. But honestly, didn’t you know that in the first place? I am so glad my tax dollars did not fund this research.

Now for your pleasure, here is the article:

When people feel pressure, the urge to take ACTION is powerful. But in many instances, the best way to respond is to DO NOTHING.

When it comes to choosing what to do, sometimes the best thing is nothing.

Consider Radek Cerny, the No. 1 goalkeeper for Tottenham Hotspur, who was facing off against Manchester United’s exuberant young midfielder, Cristiano Ronaldo, for a penalty kick during the recent fourth round of the Football Association Cup in Britain. As Ronaldo’s foot swung back for the kick, Cerny lept to the left, expecting a sharp shot to that corner. The ball barreled into the lower right. Goal! Cerny’s mistake, in Ofer H.Azar’s eyes, is that the moved to one side instead of remaining in the center, where he would have had a greater chance of stopping the ball.

Mr. Azar is not a coach or a goalie. Actually, he does not even play soccer. He’s a lecturer in the School of Management at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Mr. Azar, however, is interested in decision-making, and the split-second response of goalie stop penalty kicks struck him and several of his colleagues as a perfect real-life test case of why people sometimes make irrational decisions.

Classical economists often criticize experiments on how emotions influence financial decisions because they do not involve meaningful monetary rewards. Examining professional soccer players seems to solve that problem.

“Incentives are huge,’’ Mr. Azar and his collaborators argue in a paper that appeared not long ago in The Journal of Economic Psychology. What’s more, “goalkeepers face penalty kicks regularly, so they are not only high-motivated decision-makers, but also very experienced ones.’’ The Israeli scholars are not looking to break into the Premier League. Their point is that a preference for action over inaction can play a significant role in all kinds of economic choices.

When the economy has been doing poorly, officials are more likely to “be tempted to ‘do something,’ ’’ they argue, even if the risks outweigh the possible gains. “If things turn bad, at least they will be able to say that they tried to do something, whereas if they choose not to change anything and the situation continues to be poor (or becomes worse), it may be hard to avoid the criticism that despite the warning signs they ‘didn’t do anything.’ ’’

That sort of thinking can affect whether managers stick with their firm’s current strategy or change course. And, apparently, whether goalkeepers stand still or take a leap. For their study, Mr. Azar, along with Michael Bar-Eli, a sports psychologist; Ilana Ritov, a psychologist; and two graduate students, scanned the top leagues in the world, collecting data on 311 penalty kicks. According to their calculations, staying in the center gives the goalkeeper the best shot at halting a penalty kick — 33.3 percent, instead of 14.2 percent on the left and 12.6 percent on the right. Yet when the group analyzed how the goalkeepers had actually reacted to these penalty kicks, they discovered the goalies remained in the center just 6.3 percent of the time.

The reason, Mr. Azar contends, is rooted in how the players feel after failing to block the ball. Their soccer speculations build on the work of Amos Tversky and the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, who explored the idiosyncrasies of decision- making. In a landmark study, the two psychologists found that people had more regrets when they lost $1,200 because they chose to act, (in this case, change an investment), than people who lost $1,200 because they left their investments untouched.

What Mr. Azar and his collaborators wanted to show was that in certain situations, those results could be reversed: when acting was the standard response — like a goalkeeper’s jumping to one side on a penalty kick—not acting would make someone feel a deeper emotional pang. The result is an unconscious bias toward action. To check, they asked 32 goalkeepers in Israel’s Premier League and National League to rate how bad they felt on a scale of 1 to 10 after missing penalty kicks.As it turned out, about half of the group said “10’’no matter where they stood. Of the remaining 15, 11 felt worse when they remained in the center instead of jumping to the side. Nothing definitive, the authors acknowledge, but it does at least suggest “that goalkeepers feel worse about a goal being scored when it follows from inaction (staying in the center) than from action (jumping).’’ Outside the stadium, Mr. Azar and company argue that “action bias’’ can influence not just goalies but also investors as they decide to sell their stocks (action) or leave their portfolio untouched (inaction) during a downturn, and whether a worker chooses to look for a better job or stay put.

Marcel Zeelenberg, a social psychologist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, has found that a bias toward action or inaction often depends on whether a previous result was good or bad. After a team has a big loss, for example, the expectation is that the coach should replace the starting players, whereas after winning, leaving the lineup unchanged is considered the normal response. In an e-mail message, Mr. Zeelenberg said he thought the Israelis’ “paper is convincing because it uses real, already existing data to test a theory that was recently developed and tested only in the lab.’’

Paul Romer, an economist at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University in California, said the study illustrated an important point about economic decision-making. “How people feel about various kinds of activities means a lot about what they decide to do,’ ’Mr. Romer said.“ In many situations, we just look at the narrow monetary payoffs and we forget about the effects of preference or feelings.’’ So what do the men on the field think? Danny Cepero, a goaltender with the New York Red Bulls, a Major League Soccer team, said he could understand the emotional downside of doing nothing. If you stay put because you think a ball is coming straight up the middle and miss, he said, “you look like a fool. “Definitely it’s more acceptable to pick a side and just go.’’