In or Out? How We Decide Under Uncertainty

I was watching a game of pickleball where one of the players kept making what I thought were poor calls, enough to give me an irritating gut feeling about him: cheater. The thing was, the calls were all close. It felt impossible to get concrete evidence to back up that feeling. (Sure, I could record and really get some answers, but proving someone wrong is not my focus here.) So I sat there getting more annoyed as more of these gray calls were made. This created a feeling that I needed to defend against some sort of injustice. For the sake of his quiet opponent, I would occasionally interject to counter whatever call he made. All it really did was cause unnecessary tension over a game of pickleball.

Taking a step back, I asked myself if this type of frustration had happened before. Yes, of course, and it wasn’t just with him. These types of disagreements happen all the time. Sure, this guy may have seemed like a more extreme case to me, but that did not imply he was purposefully cheating. It seemed plausible that he was genuinely calling what he believed he saw. When I thought of other times I had played with friends, whose judgment and honesty I trusted a lot more, this type of situation still happened. We still disagreed on what had just happened. So if it wasn’t about cheating, maybe it had something to do with a difference in perception.

This led me to ask what our brains were actually capturing in those fast-paced moments of a game. Were we really able to focus and notice every movement of the ball? A quick search seemed to support my intuition. Players don’t track the ball carefully at the exact moment of contact — especially right after it hits. This explains how we arrive at different perceptions of what happened. If we were not fully capturing what happened, we leave uncertainty for our brains to interpret, leading us to jump to conclusions. We take fragments of what we saw and build something cohesive from them. A bit of improv storytelling that happens in a split second. We are not generating multiple possibilities and checking them. We go with the first story that fits. As the story forms, it makes sense that each person may arrive at a different version of an event.

In my case, I noticed that the guy’s calls tended to determine what “actually happened”. As I thought about it more, I tried to understand what gave his calls that authority. For one, he was older, so there may have been some implicit seniority factor there. But he was also usually the first to speak, and he did not ask questions. He made confident statements: “That was out.” Most people might respond, but not with the same certainty. And if challenged, he would confidently repeat the call. So timing, confidence, and persistence ended up determining which call was correct, and therefore what people did next. That was frustrating, because confidence is not indicative of expertise or truth. It is one of the most misleading cues and easiest to fake.

Frankly, I couldn’t end there. It was far too relativistic for me. There are ways to improve perception, and a form of expertise exists even in something like pickleball line calls. But one of the key challenges to improving these perceptual skills is that we rarely get clear feedback. Most of the time, we don’t actually find out what really happened. So instead of assuming someone is right, perhaps a smaller and more practical step is to recognize when uncertainty is present. To notice when we are filling in gaps and building a story from incomplete information. And to expect those moments to happen, rather than being surprised when they lead to disagreement or tension. This is hard, but worthwhile.

While this was a small example, it shows that sometimes decisions are shaped by confidence, persistence, and timing rather than sound judgment or accuracy. It also highlights how necessary it is to draw conclusions under uncertainty, yet how easily that ability can mislead us when it goes unchecked.

This example reflects a broader challenge—how we make decisions when certainty isn’t available. For a more general look at how decision-makers can navigate uncertainty, check out Gary Klein’s Psychology Today blog, How Decision Makers Can Handle Uncertainty.