Confirmation Bias: The Mind’s Reinforcement of Preexisting Beliefs and Some Suggestions for Controlling it

In his book, The Art of Thinking Clearly, author and businessman Rolf Dobelli defines Confirmation Bias as “the tendency to ignore the new information because we believe in the old information or have got used to it”, as a result, we “filter out the contradictory (disconfirming) evidence that is against our existing beliefs.”

Over the course of multiple articles, we have touched on or detailed specific types of bias:

1. The optimism bias
2. Irrationality
3. Ingroup bias

What should be clear by now is that your biases are quick, and they always jump the gun. While they are charging forward towards a conclusion, rational fact-based analysis lumbers behind struggling to keep up.

Confirmation Bias is a bias with a particularly pernicious influence. Holding us back from political, scientific, and economic advancement as well as limiting our ability to see other points of view, the consequences of this bias can be dire.

David McRaney, author of both the blog and the book You Are Not So Smart , provides an excellent quote by Terry Pratchett (through the character of Lord Veinari)

“Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things”.

I like this quote because it highlights the absurdity of human behavior. Clearly the ability and willingness to absorb new information is an essential part of learning and improving. So why the bias?

The Origins of Confirmation Bias

There are two cognitive mechanisms which explain why Confirmation Bias occurs

• Challenge Avoidance
• Reinforcement Seeking

Both are related to people’s desire to minimize cognitive dissonance, which is the psychological stress experienced when one holds two or more contradictory beliefs simultaneously.

The Most Damaging Bias

Writer Ben Yagoda recently tested his ability to minimize cognitive bias for The Atlantic. During this process he stated, “If I had to single out a particular bias as the most pervasive and damaging, it would probably be confirmation bias”.

He points to currently political divides, “where each side seems unable to allow that the other side is right about anything”. I would add to that these divides are made deeper by social media where, as a result of confirmation bias,  users select and share content related to a specific narrative and create echo chambers and a more polarized political climate.

Yagoda also details how this bias can be deadly.

“When confronted with evidence that indicated Iraq did not have [weapons of mass destruction], analysts tended to discount such information. Rather than weighing the evidence independently, analysts accepted information that fit the prevailing theory and rejected information that contradicted it.”

This is how Confirmation Bias forms our beliefs, a fact Michael Shermer explores extensively as belief-dependent realism in his book The Believing Brain “Once a belief is formed, reasons can be found to support it”.

What Can be Done?

In his attempts to breakdown bias, Yagoda came up against differing opinions as to if this was even possible. Economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of the book Thinking Fast and Slow is skeptical but social psychologist Richard Nisbett thinks training can reduce bias.

As Dan Ariely points out in his TED talk about visual illusions, “we can easily demonstrate mistakes.” With use of proper tools, for instance using a ruler to measure the length of two vertical and horizontal lines, we can prove that we have blind spots and our eyes are deceiving us. There are many examples of these optical illusions, but interestingly if you remove the ruler and look at the same misleading lines, it seems like we haven’t learned anything as our eyes tend to -still- see a difference in the lengths. Dr Ariely expresses the fact that:

“Our intuition is fooling us in a repeatable, predictable, consistent way…

There is nothing we can do about it aside from taking a ruler and starting to measure it.”

He uses visual illusions as a metaphor for decision illusions. And he states that in cognitive illusion it’s even harder to show people that they are making these mistakes.

While I take Kahneman’s point that outside of controlled situations bias will often take the wheel, I do see where training could reduce its effect. Your best best in the fight against Confirmation Bias is a range of sources, a willingness to listen to dissenting views, and keeping your social group as diverse as possible in terms of opinions.

Biases are hard to beat. Returning to the earlier race analogy, it can be difficult to outrun something that is always first off the mark.

But awareness helps.

If you’re aware enough you might be fast enough pull bias back to the start. You might be able to slow it down.

Take the ruler, measure again, and evaluate other alternatives.

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Sources and Further Study

1. The Art of Thinking Clearly, By Rolf Dobellie
2. The Believing Brain, By Michael Shermer
3. “The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain”, The Atlantic, by Ben Yagoda
4. You Are Not So Smart, By David McRaney
5. Cognitive dissonance
6. Are we in control of our own decisions? By Dan Ariely
7. Mindware by Dr Richard Nesbett