Long after doctors, nurses, epidemiologists and general experts are hailed as saviors of the modern world as we know it, historians will begin their painstaking deep-dives into how various governments around the globe made critical judgements under an extremely uncertain situation. Undoubtedly, there will be winners and losers in the final assessment.
There will be those who saved the most lives at tremendous economic cost. While others will have saved more jobs while sacrificing lives. Once the pandemic-fueled sandstorm passes, all those decisions made during times of limited visibility will either appear clairvoyant in their steadfastness or shortsighted, uninformed or God forbid, self-interested.
Black swan-caliber events are by definition nearly impossible to manage simply because there are countless moving parts. Those who can come out of such an event without damage are either lying or extremely lucky. Having said that, there is a more satisfying ending for those select leaders who have the courage (and throat capacity) to swallow extremely large, stomach-churning pills by enacting potentially unpopular data-driven policies and especially those who can suppress their intuitions in favor of relying heavily on data-driven experts.
If all you need to do is follow the data and listen to experts, making reasonable decisions should be fairly easy, right? Easier said than done, unfortunately. Psychological errors in judgements are like trying to differentiate between beautiful flowers and multi-colored flowering weeds sitting on top of landmines in an open field of uncertain options.
You can understand the flowering weeds to be psychological misjudgements rooted in our own biases, intuitions, overconfidence, and the most treacherous of them all, something behavioral psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman call the “availability” bias.
It’s worth diving a bit deeper here for the sake of understanding. Availability is like a super-charged form of a subconscious bias rooted in recent frequency of experiences or frequency of examples that are fresh in our minds. In other words, people are easy to manipulate—regardless of your IQ level. Availability lurks all around us and greatly influences our thoughts, desires and especially judgements. For example, if you watch a whole lot of one particular bend of news on television, you will start to parrot the thoughts and beliefs of the people on that channel. If you obsess over stock prices and market movements on your phone at every given opportunity, then guess what? The activity in your stock portfolio will be far higher than the person who limits access to financial news and trading apps.
Believe it or not, but all this comes into play as leaders around the world make tough decisions on combating a global pandemic. If politicians are basing decisions on poll numbers, chances of reelection or purely by conversations they are having with well-connected business leaders or lobbyists, then their policy judgements will reflect these inputs. On the other hand, if they take a more trained approach to decision making by trusting numbers, making probabilistic judgements coming from highly trained experts, then their policy judgements will be very different.
Already we are seeing tribal behavior on the part of global leaders. They are displaying a behavior psychologist Robert Cialdini calls “social proof” in which groups of people, in this case different governments, are influenced more by what other governments are doing than what the data-driven experts are recommending. Gutting the airline industry of all travel routes—against the recommendation of the World Health Organization (WHO—and closing all borders is just one such example. Different nations act for different reasons, but I remain slightly skeptical when numerous nations had the same policy one after the other—especially European Union nations who are supposed to act as a block, but the pandemic fear forced them to turn inward.
At the end of the day, a global pandemic requires a global response, but what we’re seeing all around the world is more nationalism. If an individual nation resolves the virus spread problem within its own borders, it won’t automatically contain the virus in Mexico or South Africa or Canada. The global community must listen to the data-driven experts and create a plan to help all nations—developing and poor—because that’s where the best long-term solutions reside when combating this pandemic.
Faisaling.com 
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