What are we mice or men?

I could swear that I first head the question, "What are we mice or men?" in an old "The Little Rascals" episode (the 1930's television show, not the really bad movie).  The origin of the saying probably comes from a line in the 18th century poem, To a Mouse, on Turning her up in her nest with a plough, by the Scottish poet, Robert Burns:

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men

Gang aft agley..

The writer John Steinbeck used the phrase as the title of his 1937 novella, Of Mice and Men.  Regardless of its origin, this was the phrase that came immediately to mind when I was reading Louis Menand's review of Philip Tetlock's book, Expert Political Judgement in The New Yorker, which has been the subject of several of my recent posts.  Tetlock (followed by Menand in his review) talks about an old study comparing the performance of laboratory rats with a group of undergraduate psychology students at Yale University.  I have never been able to find the original published study, so it may be one of those studies that was only published in abstract form.  Who knows?  It tells a great story though.

The experiment involved what is called a T-shaped maze (which is apparently used frequently in research with laboratory mice).  Food is placed on either the right or left side of the maze.  The rat is rewarded when it selects the correct side of the maze.  The experimental conditions were manipulated in such a way that the food was placed on the left side of the maze 60% of the time and on the right side of the maze 40% of the time.  The rats soon figured out that if they traveled to the left side of the maze, they would get food the majority of the time (60% of the time is still over half, after all).  

The Yale undergraduate students had a slightly different task.  They were asked to predict the side that the rat traveled to each time.  The students tried to find a pattern for left-right food placement, and they ended up correctly predicting which side the rats would travel to only 52% of the time.  In other words, the rats did a much better job than the Yale students!

Menand suggests that the Yale students, like the experts who failed to accurately predict the future in Tetlock's studies, like all humans, "fall in love with our hunches" and "really hate to be wrong."  Tetlock further explains, "The refusal to accept the inevitability of error - to acknowledge that some phenomena are irreducibly probabilistic - can be harmful."  To summarize, perhaps we would do better by thinking less.

Experts try to live up to their name by overanalyzing and overthinking different problem sets.  We try to come up with complicated algorithms, when a simple decision rule may just be enough to do the trick.  Some times, we may find that the best strategy to solve a complex problem is to "Stop.  Step back.  Take a deep breathe.  And look at the problem again in a different way."  

The 14th century English Franciscan monk, William of Ockham wrote, “It is futile to do with more what can be done with fewer.”  Over the years, Ockham's quote has become known as Occam's Razor, which is often paraphrased as "the simplest explanation is the best one."  Experts, all too often forget this important principle.  They try too hard to be men, when a mouse would have been more than enough.