How do the best chess players succeed? How do they find the stunning moves that win them the game?
Simple (or relatively so): they try to disprove their own ideas.
In deciding which move to make, chess players mentally map out the future consequences of each possible move, often looking about eight moves ahead. So Michelle Cowley, a cognitive scientist and keen chess player from Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, decided to study how different chess players decide whether their move strategies will be winners or losers. […]
She found that novices were more likely to convince themselves that bad moves would work out in their favour, because they focused more on the countermoves that would benefit their strategy while ignoring those that led to the downfall of their cherished hypotheses.
Conversely, masters tended to correctly predict when the eventual outcome of a move would weaken their position. “Grand masters think about what their opponents will do much more,” says Byrne. “They tend to falsify their own hypotheses.”
Chessmasters aren’t alone in this, but how widespread this cognitive technique is has been open to some debate.
The philosopher Karl Popper called this process of hypothesis testing ‘falsification’, and thought that it was the best way to describe how science constantly questions and refines itself. It is often held up as the principle that separates scientific and non-scientific thinking, and the best way to test a hypothesis.
But cognitive research has shown that, in reality, many people find falsification difficult. Until the latest study, scientists were the only group of experts that had been shown to use falsification. And sociological studies of scientists in action have revealed that even they spend a great deal of their time searching for results that would bolster their theories1. Some philosophers of science have suggested that since there is so much rivalry within science, individuals often rely on their peers to falsify their theories for them.
Byrne speculates that the behaviour may actually be widespread, but that it could be limited to those who are expert in their field. She thinks the ability to falsify is somehow linked to the vast database of knowledge that experts such as grand masters – or scientists – accumulate. “People who know their area are more likely to look for ways that things can go wrong for them,” she says.
I’m thinking here of experts in difficult or dangerous sports — rock climbing, etc. One of the things that marks an expert vs a novice is the ability to rationally evaluate the dangers and probabilities of a given course, and to not take unnecessary risks. Hardly an exact science, of course, as the number of rock climbers, even experts, who get into trouble is not trivial. But often, when that happens, it’s because hypothesis falsification has been overruled for other reasons (some famous Everest disasters come to mind).
And, of course, in a less deterministic/structured setting, it becomes more difficult to falsify hypotheses — catastrophizing (overly-negative risk assessment) can lead to paralysis, which can be an equally dangerous tack to take.
Still, an interesting observation to consider. One would hope that debate over various issues (e.g., in the blogosphere) would benefit from such internal efforts of consideration and self-evaluation, too, though that might be too much to hope for …