The Confirmation Bias
When my wife says this, the only answer is; “yes, you’re right”, particularly if we’re talking anti-Brexit or Trump. (by the way, this is the only piece of advice I gave to my son-in-law when he married my daughter, (if you met my wife or daughter you would understand better)).
But why is it that we are sometimes so convinced we’re right (even if there may be evidence to the contrary) and everything we see and hear seems to support and confirm our opinion. Is it possible that we only see what we are looking for and ignore everything else?
Enter the Confirmation Bias (and several other cognitive biases).
We all believe we are being logical and rational. The truth is that we are all subject to in-built brain biases that unconsciously influence our decisions.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to cherry-pick information that confirms our existing beliefs or ideas. Two people with opposing views on a particular topic can see the same evidence, conclude differently and both come away feeling validated by it.
Anyone who has ever been in a relationship, of any kind, will know what I mean.
For instance, if you believe, as I do, that left-handed people are more creative than right-handers then every piece of evidence, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Toulouse Lautrec, Lewis Carroll, Matt Groening, Albert Einstein, Aristotle, Martina Navratilova, confirms and supports my theory. Further supported by left-brain, right-brain theories, and, crucially ignoring all the counter-evidence. I seek proof that backs up my theory and ignores proof that may prove the opposite.
Two people with very different opinions on the same subject will interpret information that supports their view.
There were a number of experiments in the 1960s known as Watson’s rule discovery task, which showed that people have a tendency to seek information that confirms their existing beliefs.
This problem with this is that it prevents us from looking at a situation objectively. You only have to glance at our politicians in the UK (particularly in these Brexit days (years)) to see that confirmation bias masquerades as objective fact. And this can filter through to our memories as well.
We often re-imagine our past in order to fit our present needs. History is mostly written by the victors rather than the losers.
Confirmation bias like most other cognitive biases are there to save mental energy. Whilst our brains are only 2% of our whole-body weight it uses 20% of our energy. In fact, I read that a chess master, in a full day chess tournament can use up to 6000 calories. Normal active daily male consumption is about 2500 and females about 2000.
Our brains try to conserve energy and so uses shortcuts, Stereotypes, and biases to reduce the consumption of energy by using well-trodden neural pathways. Another method is the so-called Availability Heuristic which readily uses what springs to mind most recently or is most emotionally powerful and then goes no further. Basically, your first thought will do.
The desire to be right and the desire to have been right are two different things. To be right is a search for the truth and can only be good.
However, to have been right is the pride that goes before the fall. Having been right obscures the possible wrong and blocks the progress of our knowledge.
“what the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact”
Warren Buffet
So, forget trying to win the argument, you don’t stand a chance (borne out of bitter experience).
Our minds haven’t really adapted to the modern world yet. In the past, there was very little change and adaptation required during their lifetimes. Most decisions were cased around survival. But now we are bombarded with new information on an epic scale and have to make complex decisions every day. So, it’s not surprising that our evolutionary biases help us to take shortcuts and form assumptions that we use every moment of every day.
It often the case that we give extra weight and pay special attention to information that allows us to come to conclusions and decisions that we already know we want to make. We attempt to simplify the world (I’m probably not allowed to use the simplification argument at home) and make it conform to our expectations. When it comes to an adopted opinion, we draw everything we can to support and agree with that opinion.
“We are what we believe we are”
Lewis Carroll
We tend, partly because of our natural biases, to see the world more often than not, as we would like it to be, rather than as it is. We recall better evidence that backs up our beliefs. Beliefs can sometimes even survive after the destruction of the original evidence. (think conspiracy theories)
“We become what we think about”.
Earl Nightingale
Most people deny that they are affected by Confirmation Bias. We see ourselves as intelligent, logical, rational people. But beliefs and biases seem to transcend Logic and rationality and seem to be more related to emotional (probably left-handed) and intuitive decisions. This may be because the information that we interpret is heavily influenced by our beliefs.
I wonder sometimes why intelligent, rational, clever, educated, bright people sometimes believe in the craziest things.
Take, for instance, Creationists and Evolutionary Biologists.
Evolutionary biologists use observation, evidence and scientific methods to reveal the process of biological evolution over millions of years.
Creationists see the Bible as literal truth and surmise that the world is only a few thousand years old. They have become skilled at mitigating factual evidence that might disprove their belief. They may quote non-empirical evidence for their beliefs, such as spiritual experiences or the existence of the scriptures to be of greater value than the evidence for evolution. They have even suggested that fossils may have been placed there by God to test our beliefs or that fossils are there because of the flood.
I know that Charles Darwin struggled with reconciling his deeply felt beliefs with the irrefutable evidence he discovered, but in the end (it took many years) he overcame his dissonance and published.
Or homeopathy… Invented by Jacques Benveniste. He became convinced that as a solution of histamines was diluted, the effectiveness increased due to what he termed “water memories”. He was so sure of his hypothesis that he found evidence to confirm it and discarded evidence that didn’t. When other researches repeated his experiments, they proved his hypothesis to be false. Yet homeopathy only grows in support. Placebo effect? (another cognitive bias) Perhaps we all need to believe more than we need to know?
Good science tries to falsify a hypothesis, not confirm it. Yet even in science, we find examples of scientists repeating their experiments until they achieve the desired result that fits their hypothesis. The problem is that we seek information that confirms our world-view.
“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend”
Robertson Davies
And that brings us to the truth.
“All truths – even those that seemed so certain as to be immune to the possibility of revision – are essentially manufactured. Indeed, the very notion of the objectively true is a socially constructed myth. Our knowing minds are not embedded in truth. Rather the entire notion of truth is embedded in our minds, which are themselves the unwitting lackeys of organizational forms of influence” Rebecca Goldstein
So, I’m off the hook! It doesn’t matter if she’s always right. I can make my own truth. (please don’t let my wife know!)