At long last, my post about confirmation bias! Not that I think anyone was really waiting on tenterhooks for this like it was some long-awaited wisdom or earth-shattering epiphany. It was for me when I first had it. If you read my last post, then you are aware that you can never fully understand my AH-HA! Moment in regards to confirmation bias. I can describe it to you…. But that won’t do it justice. I can’t share the feeling of suddenly Getting It. I could see the code of the Matrix, and I understood how the various lines of code interacted to create and maintain our unique realities.
From your perspective, this could be just another long-winded diatribe about the human mind, a topic that was of little interest to you when I first began spewing about how minds work and one that has certainly stopped being any kind of interest sometime after. You’re here for the sex and drugs.
And were at least willing to settle for discussions about sex and drugs when neither sex nor drugs were offered when you got here. But I’m not even providing the talking-about-sex-and-drugs content anymore, and damn has this blog gone downhill recently!
Or maybe you find these explorations of humanness interesting. I don’t exactly know which of you I am speaking to.
Whether of interest or not, I hope that those of you following along this far have been entertained. Entertained and injected with information ideally, but I’d settle for entertained.
Me? This all represents about 2 years of a tumultuous mind trying to find some balance amidst several concurrent health issues, a minor mental unraveling, an unwanted journey of self-discovery that has yet to prove worth it, and now an eminate housing change.
Fun times!
Let Me ‘Splain. No, There Is No Time. Let Me Sum Up.
This post and the perceptions and subjective reality post started as one piece. At the time, it was self-referencing and internally consisted. Obviously they are not a single post anymore. If they were, you’d be there and not here.
I think all the referencing links are sorted and any jokes that could not make sense after splitting the blog post in twain have been removed. There are still plenty that won’t make sense. But no information is missing thus cock-blocking sense-making.
That said, the underlying purpose of the previous post is important. Do you need to read that one before you read this one?
Not at all!
You also don’t need to read this one. At least, I don’t think you do. I don’t know of any reason this would be required reading. I’m not requiring it of anybody
This is what you need to know: Every single person lives in their own self-generated version of reality. It’s not Absolute Reality because each individual has a variety of cognitive biases that alter their perception and understanding of What Truly Happened (and Why).
Yes, I just summed up an almost 5,000-word blog post in under 40 words. For anyone who read all of that last post and is enraged by the existence of a 40-word version: Did you not see the part in the post when I said I could have used fewer words and chose not to?
If nothing else, I am an honest narrator.
Well, yeah, except that one time, but I thought we agreed to never bring that up….
Platitudes, Wisdom, and Cliches, Oh My!
No doubt you have heard of or understand the meaning behind some of these sayings/concepts:
- What you project out the universe returns to you.
- Birds of a feather flock together.
- Whether you think you can or think you cannot, you are right.
- Fake it til you make it.
- Self-fulfilling prophecy
- The law of three-fold return
- When all you have is a hammer, the world looks like a lot of nails.
- Do or do not. There is no try.
- I knew it!
- The Power of Denial
- Dress for the job you want.
- What are you preparing? You’re always preparing. Just go!
- What goes around comes back around.
- The law of attraction
- You can manifest your own destiny.
- Cheaters always think they are being cheated.
The basic idea? What you think is. (Which might be more easily understood if read as What you think…is.)
If allow yourself to dwell upon the negative, negative things will happen. But if you believe in yourself, you can achieve great things. And if you want something hard enough, you can get it. You are drawn to and will get what you believe you deserve.
Every person’s reality lives up to that person’s expectation of reality.
You might have heard similar statements from any number of modern witches, yoga instructors, new-age enlightenment gurus, and self-help book authors. I think the book The Secret might be about this sort of thing.
And it happens to be true: Our beliefs create, define, modify, and shape our reality.
I’m not saying this from a woo-woo, way-out-there, took-too-many-shrooms perspective. I’m backing this up with behavioral and cognitive science.
First, I need to make sure we’re on the same page about confirmation bias and why our brains do it. Cause then I’m going to explain why it’s Fucking Awful.
We Want to Be Right
My AI assistant Gemini (Bard’s upgrade/replacement) defined confirmation bias like this:
Confirmation bias can be understood as our brain’s built-in “filter bubble.” It’s the tendency to seek out and favor information that supports our existing beliefs, while ignoring or downplaying things that contradict them…. [continue]
Confirmation bias plays off of and feeds into our stereotypes and paradigms. These help us filter information to help us quickly and easily make sense of our world. A solidly constructed paradigm can be the basis of confirmation bias. It can be difficult to shift solidly constructed paradigms even in the light of overwhelming contrary evidence because of confirmation bias’s ability to reduce the weight of that evidence (more on this later).
If you are interested, I wrote about paradigms and stereotypes—how and when they are useful and when they are detrimental—in Appendix C of my Why Do You Think You Think the Way That You Think? post. Appendices are stand-alone pieces, so you don’t need to read the main post for that to make sense. It might be more accurate to say if the appendix doesn’t make sense, the main post won’t help.
Confirmation Bias: It’s Like Being Gaslit By Your Own Brain
We are biased to believe information that supports our subjective reality, and we are biased to dismiss that which does not fit with our subjective reality
More simply put: I will more easily believe facts that I already agree with than those I do not.
That’s not too bad, is it? Might make accepting new ideas and trends and cultures a little challenging, but we can overcome that…right?
Oh, sweet summer child, it might look that way now. But when we get this ball rolling, it quickly becomes Fucking Awful. Those simplified understandings ignore a lot of nuance and gloss over the specifics of how it works and what it is capable of.
Because that’s literally what happens when things are simplified. The complexity is removed. Obvs! So let’s stuff the complexity back in there. So we need to complexify it…I guess?
Cram-plexify? To cram complexity into something?
Or, if you change where you break the syllable, Cramp-lexify, which could be when something is so complex you get muscle pains.
What Confirmation Bias Is Capable of
If the simplified definition of confirmation bias is too simplistic, then we need to expand upon it and examine how confirmation bias can skew reality to be what we believe reality is. Thus I present you Shane’s Five Tenets of Confirmation Bias (and what actual science calls this effect):
I – We are more receptive to data that aligns with our already-held beliefs. We tend to notice and identify information and events that confirm our belief and will often miss, ignore, or disregard that which erodes it. (Selective perception)
II – We actively seek out and overly value data that supports our belief more than data that refutes it. Even in the light of two objectively equivalent occurrences, we will skew the importance of the data and give the occurrences different weights to maintain our belief. (Confirmation seeking and resistance to disconfirming evidence)
III – Our memory favors information that supports our belief. We are likely to retain and be able to reproduce information that supports our belief and are likely to forget or be inaccurate concerning information that we have received that refutes our belief. (Selective retention)
IV – Our memories change to align with our belief. Memories are malleable, and confirmation bias can alter your memories, giving your belief greater prevalence throughout your history possibly adding justifications for a bias before you had reason to have the bias. (Memory distortion)
And now, the sinister finale:
IV – The stronger, more fundamental to our subjective reality a belief (and as such the more devastating the disruption of that belief will be on our lives and thus the greater the existential crisis and cognitive dissonance we would suffer should that belief crumble), the harder confirmation bias works to maintain that belief. (Magnitude of bias impact)
What That Looks Like: The Confirmation Cycle
Because we believe a thing to be true, we will more easily discover evidence that it is true and overlook evidence that it isn’t. And even if evidence is presented to us that it isn’t true, we will downplay how much importance that evidence has or how accurate the information is. Over time, we will gradually forget that evidence against our belief while the evidence for our belief becomes more prevalent in our minds. All of this leads to us constantly accumulating more proof that we were right all along, which further increases the confidence we have in our belief, which empowers confirmation bias to wrack up even more evidence that it is true.
Confirmation bias is by its nature self-perpetuating.
A more accurate simplification of confirmation bias than those above would be as follows:
Inherently our brains are wired to maintain the ideas, beliefs, opinions, and observations we already have and will manipulate both our current perception and our memories to achieve this goal.
Even simpler:
Our brains gaslight us into thinking what we believe to be true is true.
Every fact you think you know. Every interaction you have with others. Even the memories you have and the emotions that you feel when you remember them. Down to every little assumption you aren’t even aware you are making every moment of every day is colored by your confirmation bias so that you are right. That whatever you believe is true.
OK. Got it. But Why Is Confirmation Bias a Bad Thing?
Confirmation bias isn’t inherently a destructive influence or a flaw of human evolution. But it’s only as good as the belief it believes you want to believe. And that’s the tricky part. Let’s use Gary as an example.
If Gary believes himself to be attractive and capable, then his confirmation bias creates a virtuous cycle by continually collecting evidence that he is right. He notices his bright smile in the mirror every morning. He catches the eyes of people checking him out as he walks down the street. Gary detects the note of admiration in his boss’s “Interesting concept, explain more,” when he shares an idea. Embolden, Gary goes on to describe a novel workflow that requires a new position but would remove significant latencies…which ends up being Gary’s new job by year’s end along with a nice raise.
But with a different self-belief, the evidence mounts the other way: Gary hates the crooked nose he sees in the mirror every morning. Gary catches the frowns of people who are judging his weight as he walks down the street. He detects a dismissive, sarcastic tone in his boss’s “Interesting concept, explain more,” when he shares the idea he had. Disheartened, Gary shies from doing so. Sometime later, a new, higher-paying position that he would have been perfect for is developed for his coworker Karen.
The Subtlety Maliciousness of Perception Jacking
Our belief doesn’t just set the tone for a general mood (whether we feel confident or not) but rather alters what we see in the world. The examples above are a slice of the same person’s life. Gary does not like how his nose looks; he thinks he has a great smile. Those opinions do not change, only his general belief in himself.
Gary’s confirmation bias is not going to fight with his conscious mind, forcing Gary into liking his nose, making him think it is pretty and that that has been the whole time. Gary
It doesn’t need to change the conscious mind at all, not when it can gatekeep which data from the eyes make it to the brain for processing. Our world is too big and too full of information for our brains to process everything. As the subconscious mind starts sifting through the data, deciding what goes to the conscious mind and what gets discarded, confirmation bias makes sure confirming data goes through.
Gary didn’t choose to focus on his nose and not his smile. When he looks in the mirror, he sees his nose, not his smile. Gary didn’t infer the wrong meaning in the gazes of onlookers; he saw their faces differently. He didn’t imagine a sarcastic tone in his boss’s voice, he heard one because that’s what confirmation bias allowed through.
Gary’s confirmation bias changed his conscious perception of the world, creating for each Gary a very different subjective reality from the same Absolute Reality.
You can see how different the experience of a day is between these two Garys. Imagine that across the next years with each version of Gary continually finding more and more evidence of his belief as his belief gets stronger. Those are very different life trajectories.
Why Say Confirmation Bias Is Bad When It Can Be Good?
The picture I’ve painted has framed confirmation bias as a bad thing. Well, actually I believe I called it “Fucking Awful.”
But let me just check my notes….
Yep, I did.
My negative opinion of confirmation bias is in part a result of self-examination (which I’m not going into now) and my realization about how easily certain mindsets can take over and become the prevalent narrative of someone’s life. As I became more aware of the influence confirmation bias has, I am much more keenly aware of its influence on people around me.
The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is when you learn something new, you start seeing evidence for it everywhere as if it suddenly started existing so that you can now observe it. Because it did. For you. Up until you learned about the thing, it did not exist in your subjective reality, not in a way you could identify and codify it. #callbackAF
Confirmation bias then starts latching onto every example of that new thing it can find to support your new belief and construct a shiny new paradigm for you of whatever you just learned about.
Now you, too, can experience your confirmation bias Baader-Meinhofing confirmation bias!
This brings us to the real problem and why it’s bad/Fucking Awful: These cognitive biases don’t work alone!
So Many Biases, So Little Time
The way we take in, process, and act on information is subjected to many biases because we simply have too many stimuli and not enough time to process them all. From an evolutionary standpoint, these biases are designed to help us survive in a dangerous world where predators, harsh environments, and scarce resources threaten our survival constantly.
As such, we are not hardwired to understand and accept a world that is safe, secure, and abundant. Which is why our world isn’t safe, secure, and abundant. That could be our Absolute Reality. But too many subjective realities reject the concept.
People who believe the world isn’t safe, secure, and abundant make the world not safe, secure, and abundant for all of us because they hoard resources and violently defend them. This is why we can’t have nice things.
So what we have is a bunch of residual reflex behaviors—shortcuts and gap-fills the human brain evolved to survive in a world that no longer exists for most of us—that can act in tandem to easily, quickly, and effectively, construct a subjective reality that is counter to Absolute Reality, all factual evidence, and the prevalent narrative amongst the majority of a population.
Here are some of the big players that can influence our confirmation bias and why their influence makes it easy to develop a confirmation bias that upholds a detrimental or damaging belief.
Authority Bias.
We believe things told to us by authority figures. This is why parents can so easily get their children to believe in a magical immortal wizard who watches us at all times, knows exactly what we’re doing at any given moment, and keeps track of every good and bad thing to then decide what kind of reward we receive when we reach the end times. And we keep believing what our parents told us no matter how many times our friends tell us there is no Santa Claus. Better hope your authority figures are careful about what they put in your confirmation bias for you cause most of us are left believing whatever they made us believe (whether they knew what they were making us believe or by accident) for a long, long time.
This is also why some people are more likely to believe things said by people they respect and find powerful and influential like political figures, celebrities, and even journalists.
Negativity Bias.
This bias gives more weight to negative information or experiences compared to positive one. An item on Amazon has 20 five-star reviews, but that single one-star review makes us not click Buy. Much like confirmation bias, it affects perception and memory, making negative events more noticeable, impactful, and memorable than positive ones. So it’s easier for negative beliefs to gain traction and maintain their lead. Yay.
Anchoring Bias.
The bias to rely heavily on the first piece of information encountered when making subsequent judgments, even if that first piece of info is inaccurate. This makes it even harder to overcome whatever initial negative belief gets shoved into your confirmation bias by your parents. See how they work together to gang up on you?
Availability Heuristic.
This bias relies on readily available information to make judgments or decisions. Another way to put it is that you think the info you have for something is but a small fraction of what exists even if it is the entirety of what exists. This means if we see evidence that supports our belief, we’ll think that represents only a small portion of the evidence that must exist that supports our belief, basically making it so that we feel we have more evidence to support a belief than we actually do. As if confirmation bias needed the help….
“Butt weight,” you say. “How dare you!” I think. And then realize you said but wait and let you coninue. “Surely that must work for evidence against confirmation bias as well!”
It does, yes, but remember confirmation bias taxes that evidence by giving it less importance. When availability heuristic bulks up the amount of evidence we think something has on both sides, the thing you believe sees the bigger return on investment.
Where this hurts the most is when a belief has little evidence to go on like flat-earth theory. Availability heuristic takes the mountain of evidence that the earth is round and says “That’s not all of the evidence supporting that theory” and the Flat Earther brain is like, “Yeah, I know it isn’t.”
It then takes the ten poorly written websites explaining the Flat Earth theory and that same brain says “If these people know this, there must be tons more info out there. But THEY are suppressing it! They don’t want us to know the truth because…”
Herd Behavior.
Involves individuals mirroring the actions or beliefs of a larger group, often without critical evaluation. So if you start seeing people behaving in ways that confirm your belief (and you will see that even if that’s not what they are doing; that’s part of confirmation bias’s job, remember?), you will start mirroring this same behavior, thus living up to your belief.
False Consensus Effect.
This is when we overestimate the extent to which others share our opinions and attitudes. An example of this could be someone who is always blaming their significant other for cheating because they, themselves are often unfaithful. (Though that could also be projection depending on the situation). Or assuming all your friends like 80s hair bands because you do and you thought you hung out with people who had good taste, but it turns out nah.
Sunk Cost Fallacy.
This is the tendency to continue to invest resources (time, money, effort, brain space) into a decision or project based on the resources already put into it—even when we know we’ve put more resources into it than it’s worth. For example, when you’ve been reading about confirmation bias for two hours, and the blog post is nearly at an end, and you just keep pushing onward because you’ve already wasted two hours on this drivel, and the author has to be making a point soon….
The Thought Experiment: Gary and Invisible Fish
If you care to stick with me for a bit longer, I played out a little thought experiment showing these various cognitive behaviors at work. I use math to make it all scientific-sounding and stuff. It’s not! But it sounds good. And I do the math for you. I even used the new math when I did it. But I didn’t show my work to that level for you to be able to tell.
This is a quality read if you like puns. I might have outdone myself.
If you don’t like puns, then I guess….
I Rest My Case
Confirmation bias is great if the thing you believe is positive, useful, or comforting. It’s a real bitch when you get stuck with nonsensical beliefs about less-than-altruistic immortal wizards, conspiracy theories, or negative opinions of yourself. A belief that you didn’t have any control over.
One that was given to you, possibly in one instance of a caretaker saying one small off-hand comment that they put no thought behind and yet it hit you in your very soul. And then over the next few decades, all you see is mounting evidence that belief. Your whole reality has been based around that one “fact” that someone else gave you that you never wanted in the first place.
Unfortunately, our other biases and cognitive behaviors seem to favor us favoring self-destructive beliefs, those given to us by authority figures. This makes it much more likely to have a malevolent confirmation circle rather than a virtuous one.
This Be the Verse, indeed.
Hence the Fucking Awful.