Objective

I was recently back from my father’s funeral and was trying hard to get back to ‘normal’. It had been days, since I was staring at the instructional strategies forum- blank. One day a new discussion started. It was on Confirmation Bias. My classmates were discussing how it kills thinking. Well this killer-term got me thinking.

 

Reflective

I lost my mom at age twelve in a very simple surgery. No one had expected that such a small surgery could be fatal. That day my father lost his spirit and his faith. He was always a little biased towards destiny, but now he started connecting everything to destiny. The real ‘him’ was somewhere lost. He would talk less now but whenever he did it was about the power of destiny. He lived for twenty long years after losing his beloved. In these years, whatever he read literature, news, articles, was on the power of destiny. He lost his original circle of friends and would only gel with like-minded people. He was a diabetic, but no power on earth could get him to take his medications. He said nothing can change what is written on the wall and all we can do is bear and suffer. He died in January 2015, of multiple ailments. The doctors were dismayed by his situation in his last days- he was so infected- so full of disease.

This is an extreme example of confirmation bias in my life. When the class was talking about how confirmation bias can kill thinking- my insides were shouting out that it can kill people too.

It is probably because of my own life events that I am scared of biases. Maybe, my search for objectivity made me a researcher. The biggest bias I live with is, my bias against bias and that makes me a skeptic at times. This thought makes me tread upon another premises. My father lost faith for he was prejudiced and I tend to lose it for my fear of getting biased. Could this mean that at either end faith vanishes? Does it mean that we need to stay somewhere in between?

In order to understand biases, especially confirmation bias I started to research more on them. I dived into my own thoughts, in real-life examples, news, videos, talks, and articles to ascertain more on confirmation bias.

During this research, for the first time I realized why I could not feel inspired by talks by spiritual gurus and by those empowering lectures by business gurus, who claim to give you your dream in a few days of joining them. They capitalize on the naïve man’s confirmation bias, by making them see an inflated picture of themselves and then making them re-live that fake sense of grandiose again and again.

I read how confirmation bias is exploited by marketers for creating impactful promotions, how it is used by magicians in their shows, how politicians exploit it to build their vote bank, how it is the source of tensions in religions and caste, how it affects our feelings of security, how it has made the western image much bigger and inflated for the third world, how it affects our relationships, our daily choices like picking up organic food, how it is affects hiring decisions, how it affects our performance and even our self- image.

However, in all these scenarios that I have mentioned and many others that I failed to mention, confirmation bias is not always playing the villain. Sometimes it has a powerful positive impact on people and their lives. In some scenarios, it works like placebo.

I came across the most romantic and humorous version of confirmation bias in a TED talk by Rives on how his liking for a few lines by Wislawa Szymborska, “four in the morning” led him to create the museum of four in the morning.

Now the question that bothered me was, why do we get biased? What is so powerful in a thought that it sticks to us and grows like a weed? What gives it the power to close our mind to other thoughts? A deeper dive into my thoughts and literature gave me a plausible reason. It’s probably our stubbornness that springs up from a strange sense of self-assurance we get from our beliefs. After all we are all human beings, with superior brain functions and power of rationalization, we are all good decision-makers. But we also have an immense pool of emotions. And thus we get attached, to our chosen beliefs and ideas. Relationships and family are our comfort zone and we tend to expect the same comfort internally from our pets- our beliefs.

All this starts with an idea, an idea that resonates with us and we start looking for validations for that idea.  Well, who influences us to select that idea? I guess we like things as per our temperament- colors, books, people, subjects, and reality. So maybe it is our temperament that makes us stick to an idea. Sometimes, it’s not just temperament. Sometimes the idea comes from people or places we idealize or those we place high above ourselves in life. Sometimes it’s our circumstance that leads us to a skewed version of reality and we accept it. At times there is an idea somewhere inside us, hiding in the depths of ignorance. When some outside entity challenges it, it becomes important to us and we start acting as saviors to that idea, without realizing that we are biased.

I think, biases are like habits- easy to form and tough to get rid of. Breaking out from the bounds of biases is another story all altogether. All of us probably live with them and don’t even realize that they exist. Comfort zone is addictive. After all, there is always the fear of the unknown in new paths. Moreover, we usually surround ourselves with people who share our poll. Even when we realize that our thoughts are biased, we ignore that realization as we fear losing our thought-companions.

Maybe this was my reason for picking structural academic controversy as my topic of the presentation, as in SAC students are made to wear the other shoe and think about the other side. When we are forced to shake our heads hard and examine reality with open eyes from all angles we often feel discomfort and confusion.

I don’t want to be judgemental here, but I still remember how one day a colleague of mine was telling another, very proudly, “I have never taken a stand in my life. And that rids me of unnecessary tensions”. Till date, his words ring in my mind and I think so many times, is this the hidden mindset of many?

 

Interpretive

I think confirmation bias is a pseudo-scientific justification of one’s own beliefs made through skewed screening and selection of validating information. The conventional 3D printing technology works on printing layers on layers of the same image to elevate it and make it 3D. Similar is confirmation bias. It is the process of layering the same information over and over and giving it a solid definitive structure in one’s mind. A structure that gets hardened and impenetrable with layering.

The presence of biases is hard to discover, it is even harder to fight them. Also, all biases are not bad, some biases are beneficial. But for any bias, we need to realize when our bias becomes strong and dominating and overpower our rationality. Also, biases can make us stagnant about what we think and believe and may lead to an averseness towards new thought and ideas. The first step in dealing with biases is realizing a bias. This in itself is a challenge as we love to defend what is ours and questioning our beliefs is tough for us.

An easy way to realize if we are biased could be researching if there is an alternate set of beliefs present. And then scanning, if we have made our choice by careful scanning and scrutiny of evidence. This scanning, can itself be biased. We need to impersonalize ourselves from the information and scrutinize it, to form a new opinion. This new opinion may actually sometimes be our old beliefs and sometimes new angles may come up.

The confusion and uncertainty we feel when we try to rid ourselves of our thoughts is called cognitive dissonance. I think for developing an unbiased thinking process we need to understand that cognitive dissonance is like a side effect of medication and we have to bear it on the path of our search for objective decisions.

 

Decisional

Confirmation bias can be a weapon and it can be a tool. It all depends on the scenario and the intent. It is important for us to teach our children to be critical, but not skeptic, to be objective but not lose their subjectivity.  We need to devise 3D instructional strategies. Well, this is my dart in the dark. By 3D instructional strategies, I do not mean 3D images or digital. Rather, our instructional strategies should ensure that critical thinking skills are developed in students. That simply means looking at any issue like a multidimensional object and deciding our stand on it after carefully scrutinizing each side.

But somewhere down the line I am ‘biased’ that such an instructional design may not be possible, as we are all politically oriented, comfort zone loving human beings. Teaching subjects like politics, business, history etc. may especially be colored by what we want to teach our future generations.

 

References

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Duggan, W. (2015, March 1). Is Confirmation Bias Hurting Your Returns? Retrieved from http://www.benzinga.com/general/education/15/03/5284376/is-confirmation-bias-hurting-your-returns

Gouthro, J. (2015, March 13). Were winters really worse when we were kids?. Retrieved from http://www.capebretonpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/2015-03-13/article-4074866/Were-winters-really-worse-when-we-were-kids%3F/1

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Nickerson, R.S. ().Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology. 2(2), pp. 175-250.

Rivers, C. (2014, December 11).'Confirmation bias' has long history of helping whites demonize blacks. Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-rivers-confirmation-bias-race-20141212-story.html

Rives, P. (2014). The museum of four in the morning (Video File). Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/rives_a_museum_of_4_o_clock_in_the_morning#t-14669

Sapolsky, R.M. (2014, December 31). Mind and Matter: A Magician’s Best Trick: Revealing a Basic Human Bias. Retrieved from http://www.wsj.com/articles/confirmation-bias-is-a-basic-human-frailty-1420045281

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Shore, J. (2015, March, 19). How You Can Crush the Biggest Sales-Killing Mental Bias. Retrieved from http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/244020

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Temperament. (2015, March 9). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Temperament&oldid=650582525

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Definitions for Reference

Confirmation bias: Confirmation bias, also called myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, or recall information in a way that confirms one's beliefs or hypotheses

Cognitive dissonance: cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.

Temperament: temperament refers to those aspects of an individual's personality, such as introversion or extroversion that are often regarded as innate rather than learned.