Revealing crucial information that you might overlook.

We tend to base our judgments and decisions solely on the information available, without thinking about what might be missing. This tendency is known as the WYSIATI bias (What You See Is All There Is). One downside of this bias is that relying solely on available information can lead to uninformed decisions by overlooking critical factors that could impact the outcome. Another downside is that fraudsters, marketers and other persuaders can easily trick us into making bad choices. They don't have to hide crucial information from us, they just need to withhold it and trust that we won't think about it ourselves.

The possibility grid is a simple tool that helps us understand what important information we might be  overlooking by making all possible combinations between factors and outcomes visible. Consider, for instance, entrepreneurs: some are successful, and others aren't, while some dropped out of college, and others didn't. Because some highly successful entrepreneurs, such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, dropped out of college, people sometimes mistakenly conclude that dropping out of college causes entrepreneurs to become successful. This is an example of survivorship bias.

By using a possibility grid, we see not only the one highly visible category (= possibility) but also the other less visible categories, such as successful entrepreneurs who did not drop out of college (e.g. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett) and unsuccessful ones who either did or did not drop out of college. Imagine a two-by-two grid. The columns are labelled 'Successful' and 'Unsuccessful,' and the rows are labelled 'Dropped out of college' and 'Did not drop out of college.' This setup results in four boxes that each contain a different category of entrepreneurs:

👉 Successful & Dropped out of college – contains Steve Jobs and others

👉 Successful & Did not drop out of college – contains Elon Musk and others

👉 Unsuccessful & Dropped out of college – there are probably a lot of these

👉 Unsuccessful & Did not drop out of college – and also a lot of these

For important judgments or decisions we may want to gather information for each of the boxes. But often we don't need to know exactly how many entities are in each box. The awareness of the additional combinations helps to reduce the perceived significance of any single combination, providing a clearer and more balanced perspective. This broader view helps us avoid jumping to conclusions based on limited information.

We can, of course, extend this concept to include two-by-one, two-by-three, three-by-three, and other larger possibility grids.

Examples

There are many areas where this grid can be used to draw our attention to what we may be missing. Here are a few examples:

👉 Superstitions: Imagine you wear your lucky socks and your favorite sports team wins the game. This is a coincidence, but sometimes people believe there is a causal relationship: that the team won because you wore your lucky socks. By showing other combinations, such as wearing your lucky socks and the team losing, or not wearing your lucky socks and the team winning, the possibility grid illustrates coincidence rather than causality.

👉 Religion: Many religious traditions share stories of individuals who experienced miraculous healing after prayer. Using a possibility grid, we can also draw attention to those who prayed and were not healed, those who did not pray and were healed, and those who did not pray and were not healed.

👉 Predictions and prophecies: Let’s say someone has made some predictions about world events that actually came true, such as a war, a financial crisis, or a pandemic. What we typically overlook are his predictions that did not come true, or the world events that happened but he failed to predict.

👉 Self-help industry: Many self-help books advocate that positive thinking leads to success. The possibility grid can illustrate that while some people who practice positive thinking do become successful, others may not, and some successful people may not practice positive thinking at all. Self-help gurus often promote their services by sharing success stories from a few clients who have experienced personal breakthroughs. A two-by-one possibility grid would draw attention to the undoubtedly many clients who didn't have a personal breakthrough.

👉 Health: There’s a widespread notion that regular exercise inevitably leads to weight loss. The possibility grid can show various outcomes where people who exercise might lose or not lose weight, and similarly for those who do not exercise. When discussing the efficacy of vaccines in preventing diseases, proponents often highlight success stories of individuals who were vaccinated and remained healthy. However, they might not always mention cases where vaccinated individuals still contracted the disease, unvaccinated individuals who remained disease-free, and unvaccinated individuals who  contracted the disease. A comprehensive view would help to understand the true effectiveness of vaccines in disease prevention.

The possibility grid can help mitigate the adverse impact of survivorship bias.

References

How the Possibility Grid Can Help You Evaluate Evidence Better, Behavioral Scientist, by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris

How to Spot a Scam, Hidden Brain, by Shankar Vedantam, featuring Daniel Simons

YANSS 264 – How to psychologically inoculate yourself against scams, cons, and chicanery, You are not so smart, by David McRaney, featuring Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris

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