Confirmation Bias
We're wired to do it. We notice evidence that confirms our already established beliefs and ideas about the world, while ignoring evidence that is contrary to our established beliefs and ideas about the world. Our brains seek out ways to solidify what we know, or what we think we know. Information about the world that confirms to our established beliefs is easier to understand on a cognitive level than information that runs contrary to our established beliefs.
Confirmation bias is one of those things the human animal does so naturally that it is hard to think of it as a negative thing. After all, of course we seek out evidence that confirms our beliefs! Why would we not?
The problem with confirmation bias is that it's not independent and is based not on objectivity but on already established beliefs. We believe proposition X (for example, that my boyfriend and I have a psychic connection to each other) and then when evidence supporting this belief occurs (for example, I was thinking about calling him and right as I picked up the phone, he called me!) while ignoring all of the countless times I was thinking of calling him, and I picked up the phone and he was instead, playing Soul Caliber when I called. Or ignoring all of the times when he called me, and I was busy writing blog posts.
A willing mind can easily overcome confirmation bias by recognizing how prolifically our brainmeat tries to make connections and confirm what we already think we know.
Confirmation bias is one of those things the human animal does so naturally that it is hard to think of it as a negative thing. After all, of course we seek out evidence that confirms our beliefs! Why would we not?
The problem with confirmation bias is that it's not independent and is based not on objectivity but on already established beliefs. We believe proposition X (for example, that my boyfriend and I have a psychic connection to each other) and then when evidence supporting this belief occurs (for example, I was thinking about calling him and right as I picked up the phone, he called me!) while ignoring all of the countless times I was thinking of calling him, and I picked up the phone and he was instead, playing Soul Caliber when I called. Or ignoring all of the times when he called me, and I was busy writing blog posts.
A willing mind can easily overcome confirmation bias by recognizing how prolifically our brainmeat tries to make connections and confirm what we already think we know.
Labels: atheism, biases, fallacies, research, science, skepticism, statistics
posted by Ziztur
at
5:23 PM
7 Comments:
UHH, YOU KNOW WHAT...
I FEEL LIKE I´M IN HELL WHEN I SE YOUR PAGE..
ITS SUCH A DISKUSTING FEELING AND I HOPE I NEVER EVER FEEL LIKE THIS AGAIN.
Anonymous - you're so smart!
What the heck are you talking about?
My name is RezV
You know, sometimes I really wonder what is going on inside the head of some of these commenter.s
I guess it's so anonymous considering my name is right here ---> Rowdy
Anyhow, I'll open up by saying, in no way do I claim to have all the scientific answers, and as a christian, i believe there are some things that science can't answer, period. (free will or complex human emotions and thought that allow us to carry out these very conversations comes to mind) But one thing I have noticed about these arguments of confirmation bias, is that it not only will effect a religious man full of zeal, but also an atheist thirsty for knowledge and all too often, the "power" it gives over people who believe in a creator.
Atheists are just as willing to exclude details as we are in hopes of disproving a creator. Most arguments will even stray from the topic of God and revert to the underhanded tactics of insulting the others knowledge.
Long story short, I could attempt to prove that you are just as biased in your stead fast belief that science always prevails, as a religious man is in the existence of a God.
Unfortunately, I doubt anyone will read this seeing how old you replies are....
Here's the thing: the scientific method, practiced properly, is immune to confirmation bias in two ways. First: to do science, you first come up with a hypothesis, then you try your absolute best to disprove that hypothesis experimentally. You keep trying to disprove it until you can't think of any more ways you could possibly try to falsify it. That you're trying to disprove your hypothesis helps ward off confirmation bias. What helps even more is that the next step is to let everybody else try as hard as they possibly can to falsify it, too. If nobody can disprove your hypothesis, it becomes an official theory until and unless somebody does manage to disprove it. There are enough scientists in the world that not every one will have the same biases, so even if one suffers from confirmation bias that skews his results, hundreds of others will step in and demonstrate how wrong he is. This is what happened with the supposed link between vaccinations and autism: one guy did a crappy, biased study that found a link, then dozens or hundreds of other people did buttloads of other studies that found absolutely no link whatsoever, and the first guy wound up retracting his conclusions. And then getting his medical license revoked for gross ethical violations. But yeah.
Now, your hypothesis is that there are some things that the scientific method cannot, in principle, ever explain. Let's do some good, confirmation-bias-avoiding science on it, by trying to disprove it. Come up with everything you possibly can to disprove your own hypothesis. That's exactly what scientists are doing. They have yet to encounter something that they absolutely cannot explain with the scientific method, but they're trying.
I was having a similar conversation with somebody on facebook earlier today: the hypothesis that there is something to mind other than the physical processes is a testable one. They're working on testing it right now, in fact, over at the Blue Brain Project (http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/). I very much doubt they'll actually perfectly recreate the human nervous and endocrine systems on the first try, but in a few decades, when they finish the successor of the successor of the successor of the Blue Brain Project, then one or the other of the two competing hypotheses about the mind will be disproven.
If we perfectly recreate the human nervous and endocrine system, and it does not have complex emotions or thoughts or conversations or behaviors like a human does, then maybe that may disprove the hypothesis that all there is to mind is matter and energy. If we perfectly recreate the human nervous and endocrine system, and it does produce a mind that performs exactly like a human one, then the hypothesis that there is some supernatural element to mind will be disproven (unless you argue that the supernatural elements arise of their own accord from having all the material elements in place, in which case what's the point of postulating those supernatural elements in the first place?).
(The hypothesis that we really have free will is a much simpler thing to disprove, and doesn't even require much in the way of empirical evidence to do so, though the exact nature of the philosophical disproof of the notion of "free will" will depend on exactly how you define it.)
In any event, to tie together a number of threads, the hypothesis that there are non-material elements to the human mind is scientifically testable, and thus does not constitute a disproof of the claim that there exists nothing that cannot be tested (and thus explained) using the scientific method. Try again. (That's not jerkishness, that's a callback to where "try again until you succeed in disproving your hypothesis" is an integral part of the scientific method.)
I left something out: to be scientifically useful, a hypothesis must be in principle falsifiable. Which is to say: something like "there exists a supernatural being who cannot in principle be observed and who does not act on the material realm in any way" is rubbish, because there isn't any way you could even begin to try to disprove that claim. More importantly, it's an abjectly useless hypothesis in practice, because something that has no effects on the material realm has absolutely no relevance to our lives in any way, and thus even hypothesizing such a thing is a waste of your time and the time of anybody who has to listen to it.
But as soon as you move into the realm of "there exists some supernatural being who does act on the material realm", then that hypothesis can be tested, because you can in principle observe and therefore test the effects the supernatural being has on the material realm. Thus, we've tested (and pretty much universally disproved) hypotheses like "intercessory prayer has a positive effect".
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