Confirmation Bias and You

Fritz Kropfreiter·Thursday, 2 February 2017

Before dawn on the 27th of August, 2006, a passenger jet took off from the wrong runway in Lexington, Kentucky and crashed into trees without becoming airborne. 49 passengers and crew were killed as a result of a cabin crew that talked themselves into believing they were on the correct runway. The runway they mistakenly took was much too short to accommodate their aircraft. There were many clues that the airplane was on the wrong path, the most obvious of which was the fact that the runway lights were off. When this observation was made, the first officer responded that the last time he had flown from Lexington, there had been a technical problem with the runway lights.

How could a well trained crew make such a horrendous mistake? How could pilots who had used this airport in the past ignore clue after clue that something was seriously wrong. Their navigational instruments told them they were wrong, the length of their taxi told them they were wrong, and the lack of runway lights was the icing on the cake. The final verdict by authorities was too much chatter in the cockpit and confirmation bias, a sort of recursive self affirmation where we look for ways to force objective reality to conform with and confirm our subjective assumptions.

On 3 July 1988, the USS Vincennes, a guided missile cruiser under the command of Captain Will Rogers III, shot down an Iranian civilian airliner over Iranian airspace in the Strait of Hormuz. In the face of conflicting evidence and his own eagerness to engage the ‘enemy’, Rogers overruled caution and common sense to reframe the situation in a way that justified his subsequent actions, directly causing the death of 290 innocent passengers and crew aboard the aircraft. Again, confirmation bias turned a situation that, had it been properly analysed and reacted to purely on the evidence, would have resulted in 290 people landing safely at their destination and getting on with the rest of their lives.

Confirmation bias is a major obstacle for those of us who lose ourselves in political discourse with both those who agree with us and those who don’t. In recreating the world so that it suits our Gestalt, we often choose those facts and opinions that dovetail with our ‘big picture’ and bend non-conforming facts to our will – or reject them outright. In doing so, we insulate ourselves from the truth and, in concert with like minded individuals, cheer each other on and reinforce each other’s misperceptions.

A typical argument that takes place online goes something like this:

Rightie: Your crazy if you think that global warming is happening because of what people do.

Leftie: You’re

Rightie: Whatever, grammer nazi. Deflect, that’s all you commies do.

Leftie: I just said that we all need to work together to counteract climate change.

Rightie: And I believe you and your socialist buddies are making it all up cause your always whining about something. I have the right to believe what I believe.

Leftie: You and your fascist cadre refuse to admit facts or recognize scientific information that flies in the face of your God driven belief system.

Both sides of the conversation are riddled with assumptions that form the bedrock of confirmation bias. It often comes down to: conservatives are stupid, they can’t spell, they’re blinded by religion, and reject facts. Liberals, on the other hand, use big words to confuse the issue, are hung up on grammar, don’t understand fiscal realities, and are fanatical in their support for socialist causes and personalities. These preconceptions tend to be self reinforcing in the course of an online chat because both participants play their roles so well and because of the nature of the medium.

We were never meant to communicate ‘blind’ but that is what has happened to so much of the exchange of messages and ideas on both cell phones and the internet. Whereas conversation, previous to the electronic age, had been largely face to face, we now operate in isolation from one another. This increases the importance of word selection and eliminates inflection, facial expression, body language, and other clues that could work to minimize confirmation bias. This bias is, after all, created when the perception of the real world is incomplete and the gaps are filled in by our prejudices, pre-conceptions, and subjective evaluation.

Communication itself is quite straightforward. We receive an external or internal stimulus to communicate, we form an idea that we want to communicate, we encode it as either verbal or non-verbal, we transmit it, it is received and decoded becoming a stimulus for further communication which follows the same steps ergo, stimulus => idea => encode => transmit => receive => decode => stimulus => idea => encode => transmit =>receive => decode => etc. as in the following:

Dog sees intruder => dog thinks “Uh oh, bad thing” => dog barks => master hears bark => master thinks “dog is barking, might be intruder” => Master goes to check and finds nothing wrong => master thinks “Dog did his job” => Master pets dog => Dog senses appreciation => Dog wags tail => no stimulus for master so communication finished.

Seems like a great system but each stage has its perils, usually referred to as ‘noise’. This is not much of an issue in the previous example, but in human interactions it is endemic. For example, John sees Bill on the other side of the street and seeing him provides the stimulus for greeting which he does by waving. Bill seems to look straight through John and walks on without acknowledging his greeting. John’s feelings are hurt and the next time they meet he is very cold towards Bill. Because of John’s behaviour, Bill thinks back on the times that John has been less than enthusiastic about their friendship and sees each instance as a confirmation of John’s negative view of him. Their friendship wanes with the help of confirmation bias.

If John had confronted Bill after the first incident he might have found that Bill a) had had a run in with his boss and was distracted and worried and, therefore hadn’t noticed John’s wave or b) Bill was thinking of how to break it to his wife that her best friend had made a pass at him so had, again, been so preoccupied that he hadn’t even noticed John, or, c) that, without his contacts in, Bill hadn’t even seen John. These are all instances of ‘noise’ which interferes with effective communication and opens the door for misunderstanding, hurt feelings, and the confirmation bias which will follow if the miscommunication isn’t remedied.

This is instructive when we communicate with people who operate under different socio-political apprehensions. This is much more complicated than communication tarnished by noise such as the previous example. In complex communication centered on ideology, the noise can be absolutely deafening, coming as it does from, not only misunder-standing, but a lifetime of building paradigms, solidifying concepts, reaffirming biases, and building networks of support Add to all this baggage, family histories of political alignment cloaked in tradition (my first wife’s grandmother refused to vote Liberal in Alberta because they had been accused of stuffing ballot boxes – seventy years earlier) and you have a quagmire of misinformation, irrational beliefs, and redundant convention.

How do we begin to communicate and try to find some sort of rapprochement between the left and right, a rapprochement which is vital to survival into the twenty second century? A good start would be to eliminate confirmation bias in ourselves so that we are coming from a position of clarity and reconciliation. As is the case in a cockpit or on the bridge of a cruiser, clear communication and reliance on untainted data are the best possible foundation for the reciprocal evolution of paradigms.

Those of us on the left may have a more comprehensive understanding of key issues such as climate change, human rights, and politics itself, but until we can participate in a productive dialog with our opposite numbers in the rightist camp, we will continue the dance which has brought us to the brink of global catastrophe. Lost in confirmation bias and more concerned with winning arguments through fancy footwork than finding consensus, we continue to preach to the choir and carry our self-righteous coal to Newcastle.