Definition: The "invisible hand" of the primitive mind that tries to push you toward confirming your existing beliefs and pull you away from changing your mind.
Insight: Confirmation bias causes us to cherry-pick sources that support our ideas.
Insight: It feels good to have our views confirmed.
Insight: We tend to evaluate information from sources on how much the source confirms our beliefs rather than a proven track record of truth.
Insight: Confirmation bias shows up in behaviour such as: cherry picking, motivated skepticism, and motivated reasoning.
Insight: Sources of motivation for confirmation bias: (1) Social dependence: it is difficult to live in communities where you don't share the common view; (2) Intellectual dependence: echo chambers make people feel perfectly informed without encouraging them to search for truth - crippling them intellectually; (3) Self-esteem dependence: narratives paint the group as righteous protagonists, making believers feel good about themselves.
Principle: Find friends and people that will challenge your viewpoints, and call each other out for confirmation bias.
Principle: Seek out information that contradicts your views.
Insight: Your brain tends to selectively focus on evidence to support pre-existing beliefs. Changing your mind takes up cognitive resources.
Insight: The more varied your sources of information and open you are to new evidence, the harder it is to fall victim to confirmation bias.
Insight: People often use research after they have come to a conclusion to confirm what they believe they already know.
Insight: A culture of skepticism is important.
Insight: Some of your interventions or projects will fail - this is to be expected, and provides useful insights - if everything we do is a success it is likely we are falling to confirmation bias.
Insight: Losing or failing hurts - the more effort we put in to something, the more we ignore evidence that it has not gone well.
Insight: Pilots or test runs allow us to test ideas without putting a lot of resources behind them, so failure becomes less of a burden.
Insight: We have a tendency to engage with people that already will like our ideas or products, and ignore those that are detractors.
Principle: Be intentional about reading widely and seeking additional points of view.
Principle: Cultivate a culture and belief that failure is important.
Principle: Run pilot tests, and expect to fail.
Reference: Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril, psychologists - experiment with American football, supporters viewed the game completely differently based on pre-existing loyalties to their own team - students believed that the opposition was twice as likely to commit a foul as their own team.
Example: Government policies are viewed as more favourable by party supporters that by opposition supporters, regardless of the policy.
Insight: Confirmation bias occurs when we view the world through the lens of existing feelings or opinion.
Insight: It is difficult to overturn negative opinions.
Principle: Do not focus resources on trying to win over rejecters.
Definition: The tendency to interpret new information so that it is compatible with our existing beliefs and convictions, and ignore disconfirming evidence.
Reference: Aldous Huxley: "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored"
Reference: Warren Buffet: "What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact."
Reference: Charles Darin: set out to fight confirmation bias systematically - when observations contradicted a theory he paid more attention, and actively sought contradictions.
Reference: Arthur Quiller-Couch: "Murder your darlings." Advised us to remove what we hold dear but is redundant.
Insight: We often assume. The less clear these are, the stronger our confirmation bias tends to be.
Insight:Self-help books, particularly those with grand promises are often littered with storytelling and employ huge confirmation bias.
Definition: Seeking out information that confirms a thesis, and ignores disconfirming information.
Definition: The human tendency to look for information that reinforces ideas we already hold.
Insight: In receiving feedback we can display confirmation bias in two ways: self-verification - the tendency to pay attention to information that reinforces existing beliefs; and self-enhancement - paying attention to information that makes us feel good about ourselves.
Insight: Confirmation bias is a problem when we maintain our beliefs despite disconfirming evidence or ignore reality.
Insight: Confirmation bias can have a significant negative impact on our lives, particularly with financial decisions.
Insight: Confirmation bias combined with anchoring can lead us to project the past or current situation far into the future, and under-react to new information.
Definition: The tendency to pay attention to information that supports conclusions or beliefs, and ignore information that doesn't
Insight: No one enjoys making a bad decision, so we tend to filter information after the fact that makes us feel better.
Insight: The stronger our beliefs or opinions, the worse we are with confirmation bias, and we become more extreme.
Insight: Paying attention to disconfirming evidence is difficult - we don't like to be wrong.
Insight: Seeking disconfirming evidence can show us why we are wrong, or provide additional evidence that we are correct.
Insight: People in authority positions, or hold a lot of power are more susceptible to confirmation bias as they might feel like they have a lot to lose, and they are often sheltered from this information.
Principle: Actively look for information that proves you wrong.
Definition: We look for evidence that confirms what we want to believe.
Example: Consultants - most people just want to hear their own ideas and preferences confirmed by "expert opinion". Many people that hire consultants will dismiss findings that are counter to already existing views.
Insight: When we hold a view, we aim to convince ourselves that we are rational to hold it, and look only for evidence that confirms this view.
Principle: Do not accept the validity of people's ideas just because they have supplied their own evidence.
Principle: Specifically look for evidence that disconfirms your most tightly held views.
Definition: The tendency to seek evidence favourable to existing beliefs, and ignore or reinterpret evidence unfavourable to existing beliefs.
Example: Lawyers purposefully employ confirmation bias as there is greater incentive to win the case rather than reveal truth.
Example: Paranoia is a form of confirmation bias - if you believe everyone is out to get you, you will view the wide variety of coincidences and anomalies in life as evidence of your belief.
Reference: Psychologist Raymond Nickerson (1998): "If one were to attempt to identify a single problematic aspect of human reasoning that deserves attention above all others, the confirmation bias would have to be among the candidates for consideration. ... it appears to be sufficiently strong and pervasive that one is led to wonder whether the bias, by itself, might account for a significant fraction of the disputes, altercations, and misunderstandings that occur among individuals, groups, and nations."
Reference: Bonnie Sherman and Ziva Kunda, 1989 study - presented students with evidence contradicting deeply held beliefs, and evidence that supported the same beliefs. The students tended to overlook the first and accentuate the value of the second.
Reference: John Darley and Paul Gross - subjects watching a video of a child taking a test - some told the child was from high socioeconomic status, others that the child was from a low socioeconomic status. The subjects were asked to interpret the abilities of the child based on the results of the test. Those told the child were of high status rated the abilities of the child higher than those told the child was of lower status - the same data was interpreted differently based on what the subjects expectations were.
Definition: When we interpret new information in line with our preconceptions and expectations.
Example: We pick news outlets and information sources that confirm existing beliefs.
Insight: Choosing information sources, or being subjected to algorithms that confirm our existing beliefs is harmful for citizens and nations, as it polarises opinion.
Insight: We have a tendency to make new decisions that confirm our previous decisions.
Insight: Financial decisions are particularly prone to confirmation bias - we tend to assume that we made the best decision possible. As a result we tend to follow suit in the future.
Reference: Mazzoni, Loftus, Seitz, & Lynn, 1999: students were told their dreams would be interpreted by a clinical psychologist - but they were told fake information about the meaning of the dreams. Some students were told that the meaning of their dreams was that they had been bullied before the age of 3.
Insight: Stereotyping is an example of confirmation bias in action - we remember more easily information that confirms existing hypothesis or biases to form stereotypes.
Insight: Beliefs can influence our memories, as our brain looks for information that confirms those beliefs.
Definition: People have a tendency to search for confirming, rather than disconfirming evidence.
Insight: Confirmation becomes worse when we have assumptions that makes some disconifming evidence seem even more unlikely.
Insight: People have a tendency to be overconfident because we do not keep a record of wrong predictions - we re-write history once we know what the present situation is.
Insight: To fight confirmation bias we must systematically collect data, and search for evidence that could prove beliefs or assumptions to be incorrect.
Example: Confirmation bias can causes bosses to view people that they have invested a lot of time or energy into in a more favourable light.
Insight: Confirmation bias can lead to poor decisions and judgement, especially in the workplace.
Insight: Confirmation bias makes us more inclined to look for confirming evidence of our beliefs, rather than evidence that would disprove them.
Key Insights & Principles
Self-Awareness, Learning, & Decision Making
We choose sources to support our ideas.
We feel validated by having our beliefs and opinions confirmed.
We tend toward sources that confirm beliefs rather than those having a track record of truth.
Motivations for confirmation bias: Social Dependence - going against commonly held beliefs is difficult in your own community; Intellectual Dependence - people feel smarter when their views are confirmed in echo chambers; Self Esteem - people who are told they are right feel good about themselves.
Beliefs can influence our memories.
The more varied our sources of information, the less prone we are to confirmation bias.
A culture of skepticism is important.
People often use research that supports their hypothesis after they have come to a conclusion.
Losing, failing, or being proven wrong usually hurts us emotionally.
The more power or higher position we hold, the more prone we are to confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias can lead us to anchor on previous decisions, make make decisions based on the assumption that those decisions were right.
Seek information that contradicts your views.
Be open to changing your beliefs based on evidence.
Don't spend energy trying to win over rejecters.
Cultivate a culture and belief that failure is important.
