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).
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