Confirmation Bias

What is it: it’s our bias towards focusing on, and giving greater weight to, evidence that supports our existing beliefs and discounting evidence that contradicts them…

“I know I am right because everywhere I go looking for evidence to prove I am right, I find it!”

Overview

We all want to be right, right? None of us likes to be told our beliefs are wrong. The problem is, when we go looking for evidence to positively confirm our beliefs, we tend to focus our search in the areas we think will confirm our beliefs; we don’t go out looking for the evidence that proves we’re wrong. Well, why would we?

Well, we need to allow ourselves to be wrong, it’s how we learn. It’s uncomfortable to have our beliefs challenged, and find out we’re wrong; as Aldous Huxley put it “facts don’t cease to exist because we ignore them”.

At best this is inhibitive to our own ability to form solid, objective decisions. At worst, it can have a seriously detrimental effect on wider society, where we need to be able to ‘see the other person’s point of view’ to form mutually beneficial partnerships, to collaborate and ultimately survive.

Although we all want to be right, and that is very much driven by our ego, this bias is also the result of our twin cognitive systems; the fast and slow thinking part of our brains. Our faster thinking brain tends to want to ‘agree’ with our deeply held beliefs. Ever agreed to something almost instantly, only to then think, “Why did I just say yes to this?”

What can we do to avoid this?

How do we know when we’re doing this though? Well, there are two issues at play here. Firstly, be aware that when we’re looking for information, we subconsciously look in places where we expect there to be confirmatory evidence. When we’re researching, most of us will head for our friends or the Internet.

Friends are a great source of information, but be aware, our friends tend to be our friends, because we have similar beliefs to them, so they’re unlikely to have substantively different beliefs to us. Also bear in mind that social etiquette dictates that we feel uncomfortable giving others answers to questions we know they don’t want to hear, so we’ll often just agree with them, out of politeness.

One of the best ways to elicit objective responses is to avoid asking people if they agree with you using a closed question, like ‘Am I in the right here”? Instead rephrase it along the lines of “I think we should do it this way, how would you approach it”?

If we can’t ask friends where else can we go? Nowadays, we ten to reach for the Internet, however, one of the most pernicious modern issues is the way the Internet breeds confirmation bias in ways we often don’t realise.

Firstly, we need to be aware of the way Web content is created and distributed. Most content providers want to give us the content they think we’ll respond positively to. As such, those little cookies we hear about track what we look for whilst online and dictate what future content (usually advertising) is pushed to us. The result? We tend to get content pushed to us that already confirms what we’re looking for, because it’s based on our previous browsing history. This is especially acute with news sites and Google gives us personalised search results based on what we’ve looked for previously.

Examples

• During the pandemic, we say a huge drive to be on extreme ends of the spectrum of beliefs about Covid. Many of us became so polarised; it’s either going to kill us all and we need to be ultra safe or it’s all fake and we spent many hours searching (literally, especially online) for proof to back up our beliefs.
• Confirmation bias is often called the ‘mother of all biases’ and for good reason. I haven’t met anyone that doesn’t exhibit confirmation bias in their daily lives. Politicians are especially good to this. Political beliefs, like religious beliefs are very hard to shift and politicians will always look for evidence that ‘facts’ back up their political beliefs – but don’t be surprised to find that opposing parties can use the same facts to prove the opposite – but that statistics for you!