Cover Up, Your Confirmation Bias Is Showing
Paradigms, Fake News, Predispositions and Honestly… Everything
While bouldering at my climbing gym three days ago, a blonde, blue eyed, dark featured young man in his twenties approached me. He opened his mouth to explain one of the routes, when I immediately noticed his thick accent. As he spoke, I wondered where he might be from. Perhaps he is French? No, maybe he’s German? Or Dutch? Curiosity won and I had to ask him. He smiled. He told me that his family is German. I thought to myself, “Aha! I knew it!” Then, he continued further to say that he was actually raised in Mexico. He had a Mexican accent.
My face exposed my surprise. Even though I’ve heard Mexican accents throughout my entire life, that would have been one of my last guesses. How could I have been so off? Clearly my mind had realized his German features and created a subconscious association between his appearance and his speech; but why? In short, I had fallen for my own confirmation bias.
What Is Confirmation Bias?
Anyone remember the dress fiasco of 2015? Maybe this picture will refresh your memory:
The online world was freaking out over the dress. I remember walking into my college dorm, being bombarded with smart phone screens. A friend asked me to tell him what colors I saw. I looked at him, confused. “Is this a trick? It’s obviously black and blue…” Everyone started boisterously talking at once, claiming that many people saw white and gold instead. Skeptically, I stared at the picture again. Minutes went by, and no colors changed. This dress was clearly black and blue, my friends had been duped. I was convinced that some fake story was circulating. I refused to fall for the trap.
The days continued, and I started hearing more about this ridiculous dress. Every story that popped up in my news feed made me laugh. How were so many people falling for this? Someone sent me a link to a study about cones and rods in our eyeballs. She said that the controversy was real and had been scientifically proven. I told her to stop falling for the articles she was seeing.
Then, my psychology professor brought up the dress in class. I was incredulous. Could someone with a PhD have fallen for a social media scam? She started to explain some of the neuroscience behind the opposing visuals. I began to doubt my initial reluctance. I looked at the picture plastered on the screen in front of me. I really looked at it. I stared at it the same way I had a few days earlier. As my teacher explained more and more, I couldn’t believe what my eyes began to see. The dress was changing colors. Over the course of about five seconds, the dress faded away from the royal blue I had initially seen and became a soft beige-white. I blinked. It was blue again.
Had my eyes fooled me? How was it possible that something I was so adamantly sure of changed before my very eyes?
If you google confirmation bias, here’s the definition you get:
“The tendency to interpret new evidence as a confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories.”
I had been so sure of my preexisting beliefs about the dress, that my own eyes refused to see something right in front of me. Every article that I read only confirmed my belief. I ignored scientific explanations as if they were all deception. Until someone who I intellectually trusted shattered my predispositions, every sign I saw only reaffirmed my beliefs. It took a Professor’s opposition for my brain to question if I had been mistaken. When I stopped adamantly believing that my view was the only correct one, my mind opened up. I was ultimately able to see the dress as white, because I believed it could be true.
Paradigms
While my eyes refused to see the white, or my ears refused to hear anything that wasn’t European; cognitive bias fueled my opinion and closed my mind. Unfortunately, my story isn’t unique. This trap is universal.
Stephen Covey, the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, explains this phenomenon in the form of paradigms. Our paradigms are our views of the world. For example, someone might think that guns are evil, global warming is a hoax, genders are a societal agenda and the war on drugs is counterintuitive. Contrarily, someone might think that guns are a necessary right, humans are killing the environment, genders are binary and weed should be a Schedule 1 Drug.
You probably share some of the opinions I just stated. You might have found yourself frustrated with some of them. Either way, you read those paradigms in a way that reaffirmed your beliefs and disbeliefs. Maybe you read the statement, “guns are evil” and thought of the recent shootings. Your brain said to itself, “Those shootings are horrific. Guns are evil.” Confirmation. Maybe you read the statement, “global warming is a hoax” and thought about a recent article you read explaining how Arctic ice melt is part of a natural cycle. Your brain said to itself, “Arctic ice melt is normal. Global warming is a hoax.” Confirmation.
Maybe you read the statement, “weed is repulsive” and remembered your second cousin who is serving several years in prison for small scale marijuana distribution. Your brain said to itself, “My cousin is losing out on the best years of his life for no reason. Weed shouldn’t be a Schedule 1 Drug. Now he’ll struggle to find a job for the rest of his life. The war on drugs is counterintuitive.” Confirmation.
Confirmation bias fuels our natural inclination to hear the things we want to hear. It curtails our desperate need to be open minded. You and I live in the same world and experience the same things, but the interpretation of our experiences is entirely dependent on our existing beliefs.
Stereotypes
“We also ignore information that disputes our expectations. We are more likely to remember (and repeat) stereotype-consistent information and to forget or ignore stereotype-inconsistent information, which is one way stereotypes are maintained even in the face of disconfirming evidence. If you learn that your new Canadian friend hates hockey and loves sailing, and that your new Mexican friend hates spicy foods and loves rap music, you are less likely to remember this new stereotype-inconsistent information.” — Catherine A. Sanderson, Social Psychology
If confirmation bias intensifies our opinions about the world, it doesn’t stop short with stereotypes. Just as Catherine Sanderson says, humans tend to give greater precedence to memories that align with our preexisting ideals. Unfortunately, this means that a majority of our current beliefs are based off of the environments that we were raised in.
If I was raised in a religious home, even if I had grown to have opinions different from my parents, I’d probably be much more adverse to promiscuity. If I was raised by parents who had tattoos and piercings, I’d be much more likely to have a positive connotation towards them. Similarly, if I was raised hearing stereotypes about different races, genders, or ages (even if I later learned that they aren’t necessarily true), they would still effect my paradigms.
Data Science
Cognitive bias doesn’t only affect humans, it effects everything that learns. Just as my childhood influences my current thoughts, training data influences machine learning algorithms. If training data perpetuates systemic discrimination, the machine learning algorithm will do the same.
An experiment in 2017 showed that Google Cloud’s Natural Language API’s sentiment analysis labeled the phrase “i’m christian” as positive, but labeled the phrase “i’m a gay black woman” as negative. Obviously, the developers at Google didn’t build a tool for intentional discrimination. Rather, this was one of thousands of examples of machine learning bias.
Fake News
“Far from being a conduit for considered opinions by an educated elite, social-media platforms spread misinformation and inflame partisan differences. Indeed, people on Facebook and Twitter are more likely to share inflammatory posts that appeal to emotion than intricate arguments based on reason.” — Jeffrey Rosen, America Is Living James Madison’s Nightmare
One of the unexpected realizations brought about by the 2016 election was the disastrous effects of fake news. Massive misinformation can have a catastrophic aftermath, whether that was the intended cause or not. In the US, fake news influenced an election. In Myanmar and India, it has motivated murder. How does cognitive bias fuel this?
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As Regina Rini explains, people aren’t only likely to share posts that appeal to emotion; they want to share posts that they trust for validity. Trust on social media usually comes in the form of likes and shares. In other words, people trust posts that have been shared and liked a lot. The irony here is that fake news appeals to controversy. Controversy breeds emotion. Emotion triggers more likes and shares. Likes and shares create trust. People are directly led to trust misinformation.
Childhood beliefs influence our opinions, online likes and shares influence our trust. Cognitive bias comes in many forms.
Going To War With Our Predispositions
Just as it’s important for data scientists to recognize their biased training data when creating machine learning predictors, it’s important for humans to recognize their predispositions when making assumptions about the world. Humans are slaves to their own subjectivity, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
When two people find themselves in an intense argument, it generally stems from a clash of values. Our values influence our beliefs. Our beliefs are synonymous with our opinions. Even though at the surface it may feel like an argument requires a winner and a loser, it’s possible for both sides to be right. I thought the dress was blue and black, some people thought it was white and gold. It turns out we were all correct. I wasn’t able to see that reality until I looked at the dispute through an objective lens.
Imagine a world where everyone took five minutes to sit down and write a list of their current opinions about the world. They could write about their beliefs on:
- Religion
- Abortion
- Capitalism
- Gay Rights
- The Environment
- Politics
- Relationships
- Drugs
- Privacy
- War
- Their Friends
- Their Enemies
- Food
- Their Likes
- Their Dislikes
Now, imagine if everyone took that list and wrote down where those beliefs stemmed from. What if they wrote the first time they remember having this belief? Would most stem from their childhood? What about from a traumatic event, the influence of a superior, or a single experience?
Then, imagine if these people removed themselves from their limiting beliefs. What if they played devils advocate towards their motives? What if they sat and truly questioned if these beliefs were strengthening their lives or limiting them? Many would probably realize that they were being unknowingly controlled by dispositions from decades ago.
Open mindedness isn’t just about respecting others opinions, it’s about questioning your own too. Why view the world from a dirty lens crafted as a child when we can scrape away the smudge and find mental clarity?
There’s nothing wrong with changing our minds. Cognitive bias doesn’t always have to win.
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