I recently wrote an article about challenging our biases and before that an article on bias in the media. Identifying our biases isn’t as easy as one may think. Sure, we can take those fun psychological tests.
The interesting thing about bias is that we make decisions so automatically that we may not even think our own biases are in play. For example, I have a choice to read an article about one of our political candidates. Which article do I choose? In a split second, my bias leads me to an article that confirms my beliefs as to the article that would challenge my beliefs.
Confirmation biases don’t just shape our political opinions. They shape our view of the world around us and the decisions we make. Confirmation biases come into play within our careers, social interactions, and family life. There are three ways confirmation bias leads us down the path of shaping our opinions: (1) memory, (2) choice, and (3) interpretation.
Confirmation bias and memory
Our memories can be tricked when we expect to see a correlation between two things. The Lunar effect is a well-known memory bias. Hospital workers claim there are more emergencies during a full moon. Psychology texts state that statistics do not support the assumption. The visual tag of a full moon triggers us to pay attention to what happens during a full moon. If we expect more emergencies at that time, then we remember more emergencies, thus confirming our belief that a full moon is correlated with accidents that wind up in the emergency center.
A few decades ago, my professional role was business analyst. I gathered a lot of data on business operations, then generated KPIs for upper-level management. My job was to provide the data, not present the data. I was low man on the totem pole, but I got to see how mid-level would pick and choose the data points to support their arguments. I also got to see a very smart CIO ask the right questions to find out how the data had been cherry-picked to support the argument. The cherry picking wasn’t a nefarious action. Mid-level management really believed what they were presenting and wanted to make the best case. They “knew” they saw a pattern, a correlation between X & Y.
My goal is to be that smart CIO. What is the goal of the presenter? What is the presenter leaving out that may be important to my decision? I’m not assuming the presenter is devious. They simply allowed their confirmation bias to present the best argument for them.
Confirmation Bias and research
When we search for information, we tend to ask questions that confirm our expectations. For example, as a cat lover, I might google “Are cats better than dogs?” This search provides examples of where having a cat is better than a dog. How we frame our questions can be as telling as the answers we get from the question.
We tend to ask questions based on the answers we want to receive. The first step to any research is framing the research question. The topic can be anything from searching for a restaurant to interviewing job candidates.
For example, I was on a team interviewing a new developer. The other team members asked typical questions such as “Tell me about your experience at this company.” Or “How confident are you with Sql Server?” My question de jour was “Have you ever purposefully coded a cartesian product?”
Each interviewer was searching for something. In the instance of my colleagues, they simply wanted to know what the candidate had done leaving it open ended. They might ask follow ups on project management and testing. I was looking for creative thinking. Did they know what a cartesian product was? Could they distinguish if it happened due to a bug? Can they think outside the box and use a typical coding bug for a feature? My bias was “I don’t care what you’ve done, I want to know what you can do.” I took some flak for that but persisted anyway.
Moral of the story: sometimes asking your question from a different perspective can provide insights.
Confirmation Bias and interpretation
Two people can read or see the same information. The way they interpret that information can be completely different. This is because each person interprets the data differently. For example, the JRK assassination still has those who claim it was a conspiracy and others who support the single shooter theory.
I had a very wise instructor for my Ethnohistory class. We were fortunate to be in the DFW Metroplex, so we could go to the museum and even had the original police documents to review. He split the class up between conspiracy and single shooter. I had to argue conspiracy, which was opposite of my nature. Talk about a stretch!
Everyone in the class had the same information, but if you lean toward a mistrust of the government then then you have a tendency to place more emphasis on the data that supports conspiracy. Our confirmation bias would lead us to select the data that supported our underlying assumptions. By placing us in the opposite side of our belief system, we had to make the stretch to understand the other side.
Just as a side bar, the exercise had me questioning the single shooter theory by the end of the class, but I am still not 100% certain of a government conspiracy.
Moral of the story: if you have strong beliefs about an issue, you tend to accept at face value evidence that confirms your belief and be critical of disconfirming evidence. We subconsciously set standards lower for confirming what we believe to be true and set standards higher for what we do not believe to be true.
The Challenge
I challenge you to challenge your bias. Challenging your bias comes with a lot of benefits. You can broaden your perspective. You can understand why a colleague has a different viewpoint. You may even find yourself questioning the veracity of certain information. There is nothing wrong with questioning. Questioning leads to research. Research leads to answers.
The words ‘question’ and ‘quest’ are cognate. Only through inquiry can we discover truth. ~Carl Sagan
By the way … did you know that when presented with two medical procedures where one has a 75% survival rate after 5 years and the other has a 25% mortality rate in 5 years, the majority of folks pick the procedure with the 75% survival rate? Why? Because our bias leads us to automatically pick the procedure presented with positive words even though both are saying the same thing.
I fell for my bias just the other day. There is an old hat in a Swedish museum, found from a bog in 1938. In 1966 it was deposited in a local museum and classified to be from the 17th century. Wich was right on spot with the style of the tall, wide brimmed wool hat. However, in 2015 the museum had done a new conservation to the hat and the report said the hat was “medieval”. (The medieval period in the Nordic countries ended in 1523 to the crowning of Gustav Vasa as king of Sweden and the fall of the Kalmar Union.) My bias told me it was once again one of those blasted art historians, who – in my experience – have trouble understanding the limits of historical periods. It is actually understandable, as the renneissance as a phenomenon streches from the 13th to the 16th century. I jumped to a conclusion about the hat and expressed to a number of people, I thought the hat was from 17th, or possibly 16th century, as that seemed to confirm my bias… and made myself into an ass. If I had researched a bit further I could have found, that a radiocarbon dating also from 2015 sets the hat into a window of between 1310 – 1460.
Oh, by the way, if my comments seem too long, please do say so and I will abide to your rules. I have this tendency to ramble on.
Lol. I don’t mind long comments. Work is a little crazy right now so I can’t write as much as I’d like. BTW, even with radio carbon dating g, you could have been right about the hat. Did you get to see the report that outlined the procedure used? I would have phrased it .. based on a recent radio carbon dating, this hat could be from the Medieval period. That way I’m open to revise my hypothesis when additional data contradicts current information. Have a great day!
No, I have not seen the radiocarbon dating report myself, since the museum has not released it, wich is partly why I jumped to my conclusion, since all other information is readily awailable on the museum website. I have read about the particular c-14 testing from a fairly reliable source, altough I was surpriced, that they made the expensive test to an item with such a high risk of contamination (it was only submitted to the museum decades after being “excavated”), and an item for wich they had no corroborating dating method. I guess the Swedes simply have more money to put on these sort of escapades. Yes, I could have been right about the dating of the hat all along, since the radiocarbon sample might have been contaminated somewhere in between the discovery in 1938 and testing in 2015, but that is not my point. Fact of the matter is, that I jumped to a conclusion because of my bias and thought it confirmed my justification to hold on to my bias, despite the fact, that I know about the chance for our biases to confirm themselves within our minds and should have not fallen for it so easily. My point being, that though we can strive to be better, yet even awareness of the risk, does not make one immune to the effect of confirmation bias altough it helps in most cases to overcome it.
Yes, you are right. I should have been carefull not to so boldly state something in an academic context, altough this was nothing formal, just a discussion about cultural history.
it’s all good. Well preserved textiles are rare in the archeological recod. public rarely gets to read the report and how the test was conducted.