WHEN ANNIE DUKE flipped her cards after calling Phil Hellmuth in the 2004 World Series of Poker, the world discovered what she already knew—she was about to win the $2 million championship.

Annie wasn’t cheating and she didn’t magically know Phil’s cards. Annie had been bluffing, betting, and manipulating Phil for hours now—and when Phil Hellmuth, one of the top poker players in the world, went all in with a ten of clubs and eight of diamonds, she knew to go in for the kill.

To an outsider, the sunglassed blank stares of a professional poker game—and we’re talking big-time, big-action, pro-poker tables—may look like a vacuum of emotion. But to a pro like Duke, emotion isn’t absent from poker—it’s everything in poker, and the best players use that knowledge to make smart decisions.

Duke has written and spoken about how life—with its uncertainties, surprises, and chance—is a lot like poker. She studies what social psychologists call “confirmation bias.” Confirmation bias leads people to seek out information that confirms their beliefs, while rejecting or ignoring information that challenges or disproves their beliefs. In terms of poker, Duke’s spoken about how many of the poker pros she’s beat had a conscious or unconscious bias that a woman wouldn’t be good at poker. She explains “I figured it was part of the game that if somebody was at the table who was so emotionally invested in the fact that I was a woman, [then] that person wasn’t going to make good decisions at the table against me. So I really tried to separate that out and think about it from a strategic place of, how can I [use their biases] to come up with the best strategy to take their money?”

While it may seem odd to compare poker strategies to government policy and politics, if you examine the decisions of many of our government leaders during the COVID-19 outbreak, the real dangers of confirmation bias—and the need to limit and check the power of those officials—becomes glaringly apparent.

As the outbreak gained momentum, government officials made some misguided and dangerous policy decisions. But when their mistakes were made apparent, instead of changing course, they doubled down. For example, in January and February, federal regulators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were slow and ineffective in approving new test kits. Even when private labs were pleading with regulators to relax their approval procedures for privately developed tests, the FDA refused to change any regulations (which included burning digital copies of test application documents onto a disk and mailing them to FDA offices in Washington, DC). Yet despite other countries like South Korea or the United Kingdom rolling out tests months before the U.S., when Washington Post reporters asked the FDA whether their procedures had inhibited testing in the U.S., officials responded that they “had not hindered or been a roadblock” to the rollout of any tests.

At the state level, many governors and state agencies enacted arbitrary and unfair reopening orders that allowed some businesses to reopen with safety protocols while forcing others to remain closed—even if they followed the same safety protocols. That’s what happened to PLF client Luis Ramirez, who operates Roxy Nail Design in Hartford, Connecticut, with his wife Rosiris. When Connecticut began allowing some businesses to reopen, Roxy Nail Design was forced to stay completely closed, even though the state was allowing retail stores and hair salons to open. When the Ramirezes pointed out this inconsistency to the state and pleaded to be allowed to open using the same safety protocols as hair salons, Connecticut officials ignored the facts and refused.

From the federal to local levels, government officials acted more like they wanted to be right based on principle than on the realities of the situation. But—as Duke explains in her research—they would have done better to focus on being “accurate” than on being “right.”

Duke explains that when groups try to be “right,” they tend to “affirm that the beliefs they have are right,” while a group that tries to be “accurate” will try to “make sure the things they believe are as good a representation of the objective truth as possible.” Duke goes on to explain how accurate thought processes lead to better outcomes, because “in order to have accurate beliefs you have to be hungry for information, especially information that dissents with the prevailing view of the group.”

Unfortunately, the willingness to be proved wrong has yet to be discovered in a politician’s DNA.

Of course, there’s nothing new about policymakers allowing confirmation bias to cloud their judgment. For example, during the Vietnam War, as leadership and political science professor Matthew Wride writes, many of America’s elected and military leaders had “a nebulous relationship with the truth” and were often motivated by “personal ego, ambition, and a desire to please their superiors.” Wride also explains, “While many of these leaders were immensely talented, they believed they were infallible.” In other words, elected and military leaders’ desire to “win” the war, and a belief that America could simply outsmart its opponents, often warped their view of the realities on how the war was actually going.

Or take the New Deal. To combat rising unemployment, poverty, and hunger during the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt’s administration enacted programs that pushed massive spending and extreme economic regulations on the country. In 1939, after seven years of New Deal policies, FDR’s Treasury secretary admitted to the House Ways and Means Committee that the U.S. had “just as much unemployment as when we started.” Yet despite knowing that New Deal policies were failing to pull the nation out of depression, FDR continued pushing them which, according to economists at the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA, prolonged the Great Depression by years.

So what would more effective crisis responses look like? It might help to return to the poker table.

Annie Duke won millions by recognizing how emotions could cloud her—and her opponents’—judgment. If policymakers applied some of the lessons Duke has learned, then we might start to see better choices being made in government.

Yet even if our policymakers can improve some of their decisions, they—like poker players—are human, and still susceptible to human emotions and biases. Therefore, because every president, governor, and elected official is human, we must resist the urge to award them unchecked power—even during a crisis. The more unchecked power we give government officials, the more policies will be guided by confirmation bias, not reality.

There are no easy answers in crises. Almost by definition they’re ruled by uncertainty, chaos, and a lack of definitive information. But Americans can minimize how many of those mistakes cause real damage by ensuring that proper checks on power (and clear separations of power) are respected.

It’s bad poker to put all your chips in on a losing hand. It’s bad government to give all your power to a few people.