Confirmation bias
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Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics
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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.