Moneyball: The Behaviorist Movie

Moneyball seems to be a movie about the Oakland A's hiring baseball players when they didn't have a lot of money. Okay. It is that. But it's also a movie about a fundamental conflict in psychological paradigms.

The old-line scouts gathered around the table try to pick players by looking at the players. "He has a great swing." "He has weak legs." "He's getting old."

In other words, they are trying to pick players, really to predict performance, by looking at the player. Some even get into personality analysis. "He has an ugly girlfriend. Lacks confidence."

The hiring genius

Billy Beane, general manager of the A's and the hero of the movie, hires a fat, unathletic math genius Peter Brand. Brand persuades him to do a different kind of analysis. What do you want? Wins. How do you get wins? By getting runs. So you want to look for players who get on base a lot.

And the strategy worked for Billy Beane. (At least until the playoffs.)

He had adopted what was basically a behaviorist paradigm. We're going to try to predict behavior, not by looking at the actor, but by looking at the observable behavior. In the old behaviorist model, the player is a black box. Non-behaviorist psychology would try to look inside the box. The behaviorist psychologist looks at the inputs (= pitches), and the outcomes (= number of times the player gets on base). To heck with what's inside the box. With trying to psych out the player. We can't do that.

But, and a very big but it is, as the stock prospectuses say, "Past performance is no guarantee of future results." Moneyball points to a fundamental crux in psychology. As a science, psychology aims to predict and control behavior. One can predict behavior on a statistical basis, for large groups. Election polls do that all the time and do it pretty well. But you can't predict for individuals. And some of the particular choices Billy Beane and his sidekick make don't work out.

In other words, and I suppose I must be stating the obvious, the limitation on psychology as a science or hiring players as a science is free will—whatever that is. We can't predict any but the most physiological behaviors of an individual. And perhaps that is the saving grace for us as human beings even if it's bad for psychology and even if it makes for a pretty good movie