Confirmation Bias: When We Only See What We Want To See
Some people identify the heart with emotion and the brain with rationality. It’s a mistake. As many studies indicate, irrationality is perfectly integrated into the functioning of our nervous system, which includes the human brain.
One of the aspects of our behavior in which this irrational component is most noticeable are cognitive biases, that is, deformations in the way of reasoning that are usually unconscious and involuntary. One of the most frequent is confirmation bias, very common both in our daily and professional lives. Let’s see what it consists of.
In short, confirmation bias is a propensity to give more importance and credibility to data that fits our beliefs than to those who contradict them, although in principle both information is equally well-founded.
This bias is not only negative because it contributes to our ideas not changing. Furthermore, under its effect we run the risk of believing that totally debatable and debatable ideas are almost revealed truths, purely objective knowledge that it would be unwise to place under suspicion. That is to say, confirmation bias is the worst enemy of philosophy, since it constantly reinforces the ideas that we have automatically decided to believe at all costs.
The role of cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is a well-known concept in the field of psychology, and consists of the feeling of discomfort that we experience when an idea conflicts with one of our beliefs.
Sometimes we learn to manage this discomfort in a constructive way by modifying our explanations about reality, and other times we fail and we limit ourselves to manipulating those ideas in any way. so that the importance of what we had already been believing before prevails Confirmation bias is one of those elements that leads us to discard provocative ideas for the simple fact of being so.
To better understand what confirmation bias is and how cognitive dissonance can be poorly managed, let’s look at some examples based on a fictional case.
Examples of confirmation bias
Let’s imagine that, after visiting some websites belonging to extreme right-wing parties, a person begins to have the idea that the black population from various African countries is less intelligent than Europeans and Asians.
According to this point of view, the poverty and the little technological development experienced in these regions would be due to a lower cognitive ability in the average of the inhabitants of this region. This is a seductive idea, because it offers us a simple explanation about a phenomenon that we previously believed to be more complex, and thanks to this, and even if they do not realize it, that person begins to attribute the poverty and misfortunes suffered in these areas to the low intelligence of these people.
However, as his ideas mesh poorly with the way of thinking of many of his neighbors, this person’s beliefs are soon confronted. Some say that assuming the intellectual inferiority of the black population is very gratuitous, especially given that we still know very little about what makes some people more or less intelligent. Given this, the person realizes that the person who responds in this way is known to be a left-wing activist, and therefore assumes that his vision of reality has been distorted by propaganda progressive. This makes him not take into account what he tells him.
Another person points out that, even though slavery practically no longer exists in Western countries, the poverty of past generations of blacks still affects the education of new generations, and that is why the development of many boys and girls is complicated by the poor quality schooling, poor nutrition and other factors that have been shown to contribute to a decline in IQ. But this explanation, in the other’s eyes, is too convoluted, and that is why he rejects it: the simplest explanation It has to be that this tendency towards low intelligence is in people’s own biology.
Finally, a neighbor objects that even among middle-class black people, the stigma that weighs on black people in general due to racism has the power to make their life expectations much more modest, which is why they do not give it as much importance to education from a young age and, consequently, they arrive with more insecurity and less experience to intelligence tests, batteries of exercises that are very reminiscent of everything that is done in the academic context. But this explanation is still not as simple and “airtight” as the idea that black people are less intelligent, so It is also taken as a distortion of reality to make it fit into one’s own ideology.
In the future, this person will notice all the representations of black people that appear on television and other media, and every time he sees a case of murder by an African-American citizen, for example, he will attribute it to the inability of this to earn a living in a civilized way. On the other hand, when you see a black person who has been successful in life and has an excellent training and education, you will attribute this to the influence that “white culture” has had on him.
Ignoring what contradicts us, accepting what reaffirms us
As we have seen in the example, confirmation bias can have dramatic consequences on the way we interpret reality For example, it makes the simplicity of a belief be seen as a positive quality of it, regardless of the dangers that simplisms entail: it can lead us to circular thinking, because such a simple belief explains everything and at the same time explains nothing.
On the other hand, another characteristic of confirmation bias is that it causes all experiences that can be used to reinforce a belief to immediately capture our attention, while those that contradict us are ignored or, at most, lead us to tiptoe around. about them, looking for any explanation that allows us to see that our ideas do not have to be threatened.
In the example, hypotheses based on social influence and education are discarded systematically in favor of an explanation based on biology, but the opposite happens when seeing a black person who is much more educated than the average citizen: in this case, the explanation does lie in the social sphere.
