Confirmation bias

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You will be familiar with the experience of the futile argument with to someone who holds a contrary idea to yours. If you’re not, what the hell were you doing at university? The atheist who heckles the born-again preacher — or vice versa — will know this feeling. So will Marxists who engage capitalists, climate deniers who take on lentil-munching XR eco-warrior types and anyone who’s tried querying force ranking with HR.

This kind of arguments is fruitless — exhilarating, for a while, but quite pointless — at least until you push one hot button too far, and it’s all-out war.

It is pointless to argue across these intellectual divides because everyone who holds a view from one tradition will accept as immutable proof of it any contention, however wan, which seems to support it, and will explain away, dissemble or, at the limit, flat-out ignore any assertion — such as one from another tradition — which tends to undermine it.

We all apply a rose-tinted filter, that is to say.

Our acceptance of incoming information is biased in favour of what we want to hear — which confirms our existing narrative — and against information which undermines it. Hence confirmation bias.

See also

• Texas sharpshooter fallacy
• Prosecutor’s tunnel vision
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — Thomas Kuhn’s wonderful book which explains this is a different, but just as compelling, way.
• Cognitive dissonance
• Causation — The relation to a given conclusion enjoyed by ideas with which you happen to agree;
• Correlation — The relation to a given conclusion suffered by ideas with which you do not.