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Confirmation Bias




Confirmation bias is a phrase I have been hearing a lot lately. It is simply the tendency in humans to give more weight to evidence that supports their beliefs: to “confirm” them. I have been hearing about it and seeing evidence of it especially in the political realm of late. Oh, no party has a monopoly on this; everyone does it to a certain extent. Every time you see a meme on Facebook that makes you go “Yeah!” and immediately repost it, without checking to see if it is actually true, you are not only guilty of it, but are encouraging it in others.

Let’s say, you take a firm stand on trade for example. You could be someone who believes in free trade, or alternately, you could believe in protectionism.  Whichever it is, you believe in it, and you want others to believe in it too, so you go about looking for evidence that supports your view. See, you are already in trouble. Instead of gathering evidence to see which model is actually better, you have already decided before you start gathering evidence. At this point, it doesn’t matter much what you do. You are going to find evidence supporting your view. Any evidence that runs counter to your belief is simply not going to make it on your radar. If you are a free trader, you will find evidence that free trade boosts the economy, lowers prices for the consumer, increases foreign investment. If you hold more of a protectionist belief, you may find evidence that protectionism helps boost domestic companies, that it increases local jobs and wages. Whichever view you hold, you will look at the evidence through your own biased lens. Every news item or op-ed that supports your view will make you go, “see! That’s just what I’m talking about!” Every news item that runs counter to your belief, you will simply see as faulty. This is called cherry-picking the data. But interpretation comes into it too. Each side can look at the same piece of data and interpret it to fit his own belief system. Having confirmation bias doesn’t make you a bad person. We all do it to some degree. But the world would run smoother if we could all recognize it in ourselves and try to overcome it.

Dealing with confirmation bias is one of the mainstays of the modern scientific method. The scientific method has given us the modern world. It has given us modern medicine, modern transportation, the power grid, telecommunication etc. Science had to come out of the dark age to do this. And one of the main things science had to overcome was the bias of the scientist. If a scientist had a belief, stated it as fact, and didn’t bother to test it, the world was stuck. Aristotle was a great thinker, but he made some rather bizarre statements. He said that women had fewer teeth than men, that eels spontaneously generate out of mud, that the Earth is the center of the universe, that heavy objects fall faster than light objects. The problem is, he just came up with these ideas. He didn’t bother to test them (I mean, how hard can it be to count how many teeth women have and how many men have?) But Aristotle said these things and everyone accepted them because Aristotle said so. Galileo went to prison because he disagreed with Aristotle (since the church believed Aristotle, saying anything different was heresy, no matter your pesky little experiments. No, don’t try to confuse me with facts.)

Just having experiments and tests does not bring us to the modern scientific method. You can still perform experiments that will support your hypothesis and ignore others. Or interpret the data to favor your belief. No, to make science really modern was to get rid of the bias of the scientist.  So, we have things like double blind studies where neither the subjects nor the scientist, know which group of people are taking the experimental drug, and which are taking a placebo.  This is the only way to get data that isn’t skewed. This hasn’t completely eliminated bias. If a piece of data has any ambiguity in it, two different scientists can still interpret it in different ways. But the path to the truth is much clearer than it was in the old days, and more often than not, there is a scientific consensus about what the data means.

So, it is good to periodically examine your beliefs dispassionately, like as an outsider looking in. See how your beliefs jive with actual (you know) facts. And if you are reading this and thinking ‘yes, that is just what those people need to do,’ you are missing the point. You will need to examine your biases. We all do. We all drink from our own respective Kool-Aid.

(My science fiction novel Star Liner, is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon and other online sources).

Link to Star Liner

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