Thoughts On Confirmation Bias (With Quotes From YOU ARE NOT SO SMART)
Some quotes from the book You Are Not So Smart on confirmation bias:
-THE MISCONCEPTION: Your opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis.
THE TRUTH: Your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information that confirmed what you believed, while ignoring information that challenged your preconceived notions.
-Punditry is an industry built on confirmation bias. Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck and Arianna Huffington, Rachel Maddow and Ann Colter — these people provide fuel for beliefs, they pre-filter the world to match existing worldviews. If their filter is like your filter, you love them. If it isn’t, you hate them. You watch them not for information but for confirmation.
-(Quote from Terry Pratchett’s The Truth): “People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things…In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds…telling people that what they think they already knew is true.
-Valdis Krebs has researched purchasing trends on Amazon and the clustering habits of people on social networks for years, and his research shows what psychological research into confirmation bias predicts: you want to be right about how you see the world, so you seek out information that confirms your beliefs and avoid contradictory evidence and opinions.
-Half a century of research has placed confirmation bias among the most dependable of mental stumbling blocks. Journalists looking to tell a certain story must avoid the tendency to ignore evidence to the contrary; scientists looking to prove a hypothesis must avoid designing experiments with little wiggle room for alternat outcomes.
-Remember, There’s always someone out there willing to sell eyeballs to advertisers by offering a guaranteed audience of people looking for validation. Ask yourself if you are in that audience. In science, you move closer to the truth by seeking evidence to the contrary. Perhaps the same method should inform your opinions as well.
Some thoughts on these quotes:
Another confirmation bias we all have is, when reading quotes like these, we think: “Yeah, that is SO like so many people I know” without considering how often we ourselves fall into that trap.
Some of us on some level realize our beliefs are held together by confirmation bias, and therefore prefer not to discuss them with others, knowing our bias will be challenged. Others of us are willing to cut ourselves off from entire segments of society and flock with people of like beliefs rather than have our beliefs challenged. Still others unwittingly expose our confirmation bias by heatedly defending our positions online and elsewhere without respect for opposing perspectives. Some few of us may humbly be aware of our potential for confirmation bias but are willing to expose them to others in hopes that we may be corrected if we are wrong.
It’s hard revealing our most challenged beliefs to a public that may be hostile to them. It’s far easier to congregate with people who share our convictions and — yes — our biases. But the more we do so, the less likely what we hold to be true will be truth and not bias.
If you find yourself gathering more and more with one segment of society and becoming more and more intolerant of another segment of society, you are most definitely engaging in confirmation bias. If you are unable or unwilling to engage with those who disagree with you, it is a safe bet that you are not asking the tough questions yourself, those questions that might lead you to modify or even refute your own position.
This does not place you above others. At best, it places you on par with the worst of us. I get it, intellectual humility sucks. Engaging in dialectics is hard work. But it makes you stronger in the long run. Having strong arguments will allow you to be charitable with those who may disagree with you. Rather than cutting them off, you can maintain dialog with them and establish areas of commonality in which you can in turn allow them to acknowledge some of their confirmation biases.
It’s called communication. Not only with others but with ourselves. The more comfortable we are with allowing thoughts in our own heads to question our beliefs and biases, the more comfortable we will be with others who might be coming from a different perspective.
Who knows, we might even discover the possibility of educating and uplifting others from a point of wisdom, not of bias. I may be biased, but I think that’s a goal worthy of aspiring to.