Cognitive Cow

These two words sum up basically every political, philosophical, and religious rant I’ve had so far on this web site. I want to talk about what a confirmation bias, why it is one of the most obvious flaws in human reasoning, and how to avoid it.

A confirmation bias affects how new evidence is interpreted to alter our opinions and beliefs. In short, it’s interpreting new data to fit our preconceived or desired beliefs and rejecting, disbelieving, or contorting contradictory data. When a person holds a confirmation bias, they will not try to falsify their beliefs, but rather just confirm them with evidence that they see fit.

I talked a while ago about an annoying religious aphorism that I’m sure we’ve all heard at some point. “The Lord works in mysterious ways” is a phrase that illustrates confirmation bias perfectly. Using this phrase, or similar phrases, to explain things is using selective interpretations to confirm a preconceived notion that a god exists. However, the problem here is that no other explanation is properly considered. For example, the event in question could very well be explained without a supernatural entity, making this new explanation far more probable.

Conspiracy theories suffer confirmation bias, but now it’s taken to an extreme. Conspiracy theories are based on solid evidence but more often than not they start with a conclusion and then interpret all of the data to fit that conclusion. Take the 9/11 conspiracies, for example. Most of these conspiracies seem to make the claim that the US government was involved in taking down the two towers. I’ve seen smart people do amazing mathematical calculations, precise data collection and time line analysis, and often very detailed understandings of commercial aircraft, the air force, and members of our government all in the name of confirming this conspiracy theory. However, there is one big problem in these conspiracy theories: they set out to confirm that they’re true instead of failing to falsify the theory.

The way I see things, a theory or explanation must do one of two things to be considered useful. First, it must make accurate predictions about the future that cannot be attributed to any other explanation and second it must be clearly falsifiable. I don’t think both are needed except in the case where the falsifiability is too difficult to actually test. In both of the cases with religious aphorisms and conspiracy theories, they have neither of these qualities so they fail to be useful explanations for the state of the universe.

A confirmation bias is extremely difficult to avoid. I’m guessing most people are similar to me and they like to be right. There’s a certain shame in admitting a previously held belief is actually false especially if this belief is important to you, like religion. In order to avoid a confirmation bias, a lot of times all that is needed is to be aware that this bias exists and to ask oneself if you’re taking a side or being fair in your reasoning. Don’t allow yourself to become really attached to an idea unless you can be clear to people that you are willing to change your view if proper evidence shows itself.