Confirmation Bias
People do, and believe, incredibly stupid things. This is true of everyone, at various points. There are no exceptions. The question then becomes: why? The beautiful thing is that we can explain why, within certain limits, anyway. And because we can explain why, we can start to take steps to route around these flaws in our thinking.
Confirmation bias in one of many hard-wired features of our brains that leads us to do stupid things. At its core, it’s a very simple concept: human beings have a tendency to accept evidence that supports their preconceptions and ignore or dispute evidence that disagrees with them.
American Football is having its playoffs at the moment, which provides an interesting case for looking at confirmation bias at work. Every year, in at least a few key games, you’ll hear complaints that the refs won the game for the victors. A blown call or obviously biased spot made the pivotal play possible, and turned the tide of the game.
Now, it’s impossible to actually prove this one way or another. The rulebook leaves room for interpretation, the human eye is an imperfect measuring device, and so on. It’s impossible to quantify what actually constitutes a blown call, and it’d be doubly impossible to gather real statistics on the rate and frequency of blown calls. It’s that very lack of statistics that should make us wary of making quick judgments.
In any given game, the refs have to make a vast number of decisions; they have to watch the activities of 22 players, each with distinct jobs and restrictions, they have to track the ball, they have to make quick decisions about very complex events, relying on their senses and good judgement. Even if we assume that there’s a very low 1% error rate in a ref’s officiating, and each player only performs one action on every play, that means the ref will be wrong about something on nearly a quarter of the plays.
The reality is likely a greater frequency of errors. Why don’t we hear football fans decrying this? Because the mistakes are mostly randomly distributed and they usually don’t have a major impact on the outcome of the game. So they’re forgotten very quickly (or never even noticed). The incidents that we remember are the incidents where a blown call turns out to have a major impact- a rare occurrence.
That’s confirmation bias at work, in the form of “biased memory”. I’ve also seen discussions where people debate over one of these major calls- one person claims that it was blown, the other claims it was not. One or the other pores over the video replays and builds a convincing case for their side. One might expect that such a presentation would sway the debate in their favor, but quite the opposite usually happens- their opponent twists it around to support their case, or disregards it entirely. This is possibly a form of “biased interpretation” (on the part of either fan!) or a case of “biased search for information”- “cherry picking”. Perhaps the person found just the handful of frames that made their claim look legitimate, even though watching the video in context shows that they were incorrect.
These sorts of cognitive biases are part of being human. That kind of sucks, in a way- no matter how smart we get, we’ll always get suckered into doing stupid things because our brains just aren’t really good at making certain kinds of decisions. The awesome part, on the other hand, is that we can, if nothing else, be aware of these biases. We can think about thinking, and that means that, at least some of the time, we can avoid serious mistakes by being careful.
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awesomethingoftheday posted this
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