Do we actually like to have agency when making decisions? Suppose you are a doctor. Distinguished honors hang in polished frames in your office. Your bottom desk drawer is bustling with ‘Thank you’ cards sent by patients who had thought there was no hope. You have the experience and the critical thinking skills to understand and break down a problem. You always seem to know what to do.
Now, you have two patients, both with the same age and similar health profiles. Unfortunately, both need new heart transplants. You know, the thing that pumps your blood and keeps you alive? Yeah, you need two of them for the patients, but only one is available. How do you decide? Who will you choose to later send you the thank you card, and whose funeral might you get an invite for?
Would you ever just flip a coin?
I think most people and families would be outraged if they ever found out a doctor had done such a thing. Not to mention that I don’t really believe any ethical doctor would resolve to flipping a coin.
In all likelihood, the doctor would choose the patient based on some marginal characteristic. Maybe the time they entered the hospital, or were put on the transplant list. Something deterministic.
But is it about the randomness, or the coin itself?
The coin, as s a symbol, just doesn’t seem to carry the magnitude of the decision being made or its consequences. Nor does the ‘simple flip’ indicate the analysis that might have been needed. There is this dissonance between the task of flipping a coin and deciding someone’s fate.
But the coin itself, represents chance. It’s completely unbiased. Regardless of other factors, it doesn’t care about who arrived first, or the color of the skin of the patients, their age, or their sex. All it knows is randomness.
If we think randomness shouldn’t be a part of this, that’s where I think we might not be considering the whole picture. Wasn’t it random which patient entered the hospital before the other? Wasn’t it random who got injured first? At least to anyone in the hospital, all those things could be treated as random orderings.
Life is a series of random choices and events that end up placing us where we currently are. We want to find meaning in everything we do. To tell a story that explains what happens to us.
And there is. But that story started with randomness. Your place of birth, or your X or Y chromosome. And you’ll likely find that throughout your story, randomness, probably decided fate for you.
You Didn’t Pick Your Life. At Least not Entirely.
Take a look at the balls falling into place on the Galton board above. Each bounce has a chance of making the ball go either left or right. Successive ‘rights’ and you end up on the far right! That’s what financial success might look like. Too many ‘lefts’ and you end up worse than average.
Sure, there is hard work involved. You might grind more than Gary V, but also end up vastly better or worse off than him. Now, the point isn’t that everything is related to chance. The point is that life has a series of seemingly random occurrences.
That dream house you just bought after seeing it on Zillow. What if a better house had come onto the market a few days later? You might never have made friends with the neighbors you have now. Or end up having the life you do just because you didn’t pick the house down the street.
Sure, there is a valid reason behind why the houses were listed when they were. But to you, they are random. From your view, and to your life, the reason isn’t important behind unintentional events.
Why do we Hate on Random Decisions?
Going back to your life as a doctor, why do you think it’s better to let an arbitrary place in the ‘transplant waiting list’ act as a valid oracle vs a flip of the coin? Sure there are other factor’s that go into deciding who gets the organ, but even those might be no better in terms of embedded randomness.
My point is, we can’t escape from randomness. But we severely dislike making decisions with randomness, at least when it comes to decisions with perceived moderate to high consequences.
Not sure which college, out of your top 2, to go to? You might be hard pressed to find a student willing to just flip a coin. We believe that everything has an order, or at least perceived order. If you look deep enough, sure, you might find something. Maybe the windows of the dorm you’ll be living in for one college are slightly smaller than the others. This was a ridiculous example, but as long as we can avoid random decision-making, we are willing to find some way of justifying it.
Before anything else, assign blame …
Well, randomness does one thing. It prevents the assignment of blame. Who can be held responsible for whether the coin comes up heads or tails? The decision to use the coin can be questioned, but not the final outcome.
We want someone to be held morally accountable for the decisions, especially those related to life and death. When someone is accountable, we somehow trust that they will make a decision that reflects fairness. But why is a flip of a coin any less fair? Rationally speaking, it’s more fair than anything else. But maybe we think that there is always a way to rationalize.
Of course, this means it’s still up to people to decide when rational choice is no longer applicable. And until that point is reached, any use of randomization is discouraged.
In 1968, Italy won over USSR, pushing them to the European Championship final. All because of a coin-toss. At that time, penalty kicks weren’t used to break ties. As a sport used to assess competitive skills, it can be said that ending the game with a randomization device was, well, stupid.
Similarly, when a judge used a flip of a coin to determine the custody of a child for Christmas, there was outrage. The action was condemned. Why did the judge decide to use a coin to make a decision that could probably have been reasoned about?
In the previous two situations, what was missing? Something to pin the blame on. Can you blame the caller for choosing the wrong side of the coin? No, but you can blame the team for not being good enough. We can also blame the parent who didn’t get custody, for missing an arbitrary dance recital. It’s a reason. An arguably absurd reason. But one that provides a better story than a coin.
Inappropriate but Fair
Coin flips, and more generally, random decisions, can be seen to be distributively fair. This means that the outcome produced can be thought to have been fairly allocated. A coin, by its nature, will give both parties a 50% chance of success.
But the problem that people have with using randomization is in its lack ofprocedural fairness. That is, the coin, or whatever random device is used, is perceived to not be very fair in supporting its decision.
In a series of experiments, Gideon Karen and Karl Tiegen tested how people perceive randomness as ethical and fair decision-makers. It seems that regardless of how difficult the decision might seem, the coin-flip was rejected as a viable solution. Even if the participants acknowledged the fairness of the coin, they had trouble with the lack of procedural fairness of the coin.
In high-stake events, even if there is no good decision to be made, letting chance decide fate was thought to be repulsive. Even if there are a series of random events that might lead people to the cross-roads, actively relying on chance in such situations is not a default for people.
In low-stake scenarios, people are more accepting of the use of randomized decision-making. Of course, people would still need to have their rationality exhausted. But what decides when the stakes are low? Let’s say you and your co-author have to decide the order in which your names appear on a paper. What if the paper revealed ground-breaking research? Someone has to take the second position.
So to recap. People’s lives are a series of random events. But those random events are usually not actively presented to us as decisions. It’s only when we have to make the decisions ourselves that we are disgusted by randomness.
Usually situations might not be black or white, but for quick and fair decisions, maybe we need to accept that even rationality has limits, and sometimes, a coin-flip is necessary even in high-stake situations.