Our own biases affect how we see truth, what is true and what isn’t.
It’s no secret that we’re all subject to our own internal biases. There’s plenty of research and data on the subject.
It’s entirely up to us whether we give in to our biases. The strong-willed among us attempt to control our biases while the weak-willed of us take the easy path and let our biases control us. Of course, just being aware of our biases doesn’t mean we can totally negate them.
Because of that, some would suggest we do nothing. It’s impossible to eliminate our own biases to the point of neutrality, so we should just accept them.
As is always the case, offer an easy route to the weak and they will jump at it. But trying to control our own biases, even imperfectly, will help us to make better decisions and make it harder for others to manipulate us.
Let’s imagine a scale ranging from -5 to +5, with the most negative bias at -5 and the most positive bias at +5. The zero point is neutral bias, the point where we’re able to assess information completely objectively.
If we have a bias on a subject of -4, can we really hope to achieve a neutral bias when considering any aspect of that subject? Possibly, but it’s also possible that we may adjust our position to just -1 or overcompensate and assess the issue with a bias of +1.
While attempting to neutralise our biases is unlikely to be perfect, that’s no reason to just give in to our biases and act like animals. Biases of -1 or +1 are both better than a bias of -4.
Judges and journalists have to attempt this on a daily basis (at least they should, but there seem to be too many “journalists” today who embrace and run with their own biases).
We only have to look at the US Supreme Court to see the difficulty in action. Judges are nominated by presidents. They’re selected for many reasons and their perceived biases are clearly part of this.
While we can hope the judges will do a generally good job of maintaining objectivity, we only have to look at the way the court tends to split on the big divisive ideological issues to see how their biases lead them to vote in ways that align with the beliefs of the party of the president that nominated them.
We consider ourselves the most advanced species on the planet, so surely we should be able to set ourselves apart and use our ability for rational, subjective and abstract thought.
However, many if not most of us lean into it. It’s easier to give our biases free rein.
For one example, many white racists claim that black people are inferior1 and it’s actually a kindness to recognise this and manage the black people for their own good.
It’s not true, black people aren’t inferior. In some cases, they may not have benefited from the same level of education as white people, even when living as part of the same society, but that doesn’t make them intellectually inferior.
Many of the most prominent racists are well-educated and despite that, they still lack the mental strength to recognise or understand their own irrational biases.
Perhaps the most absurd irony of racism is that racists are suffering from a clear and undeniable intellectual deficiency while preaching that people of other races are inferior.
But bias doesn’t only apply to our views on race, it applies to our views on everything. In any case where someone lets their biases control them, whether it’s a weak man trying to feel more powerful by treating women as inferiors or a homophobe who’s worried “they might catch it”, they’re lacking the intellectual capacity to exert self-control and understand their own weaknesses.
The Joy Of Certainty
“What men seek is not knowledge but certainty.”
That’s one form of a quote that’s generally attributed to the British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell.
We naturally assume that we always want to know the truth, but the reality revealed in Russell’s quote is that the truth is less important than feeling sure that what we believe is true.
His quote is perhaps another way to describe the psychological effect called Confirmation Bias.2 This describes a tendency for us to prefer, even actively seek or interpret, information that supports our existing beliefs.
It can affect our ability to process information accurately at multiple levels. We will tend towards searching for information in a way that is more likely to find data that supports our existing beliefs, such as phrasing questions or search terms in ways more likely to elicit the responses we want.
If we’re able to neutralise that effect, we still have to fight a tendency to interpret information in a way that supports our existing views. So we may read an article that presents equal numbers of statements supporting opposing viewpoints and choose to give more weight to the statements we agree with and ignore those statements that undermine our view.
Even if we’re able to neutralise the effect at this stage, we still have to contend with the issue of selective recall. We may store supporting arguments for opposing viewpoints in our memory, but our bias for one viewpoint means that when we come to use this information to argue one way or another, we recall the information that supports our view and seemingly forget the other data we’d previously committed to memory.
It doesn’t matter how smart or otherwise we think we are, intelligence isn’t a factor in the effect of confirmation bias. It’s deep-seated in all of us it seems. One study even used MRI scans to determine that different parts of the brain were active in situations where confirmation bias could be influencing thoughts, compared to when confirmation bias was unlikely to be in play.3
So this effect is apparently quite automatic in each of us, but that doesn’t mean we have to roll-over onto our backs and accept it. If we know that we’re likely to act in this way, we can take active steps to try and counter the effect.
Why Do We Have Confirmation Bias?
Understanding why we’re subject to the effect of confirmation bias has to be a good starting point in working out how to reduce its effect on us.
It’s understandable that having peace of mind is going to be desirable. Who wants to live in a constant state of questioning the validity of everything that we believe?
It’s an uneasy and uncomfortable position to be in. Imagine constantly doubting the truth of what you believe, doubting the people that you know. It would be exhausting, always trying to second guess what’s going on around you.
Do you remember a time when you did something you shouldn’t have? Maybe damaged a prized ornament, took something you shouldn’t have or threw a ball through a school window. And then, rather than taking responsibility and owning up, you tried to hide what you’d done?
This wasn’t just me as a child, was it?
If you recognise that kind of scenario, do you remember the way the pressure built up on you? The way that you constantly seemed to be thinking about what you’d done and the trouble you’d be in if anyone found out? How it felt like a huge force was bearing down on you and nothing would relieve that pressure. Except, if you got away with it, time.
However, you probably didn’t get away with it. Someone saw and told or a camera recorded the act or there simply wasn’t any other plausible explanation than you did it. At the moment you were found out, all of those fears came crashing down on you, but once you’d faced your punishment, something weird happened.
You felt better. You were facing no pocket money till you’d paid for the damage, were grounded for a month or had a week of detentions to look forward to, but all that pressure that had built up and was crushing the joy from your life evaporated.
The fear and discomfort you’d been feeling were actually worse than the punishment you received.
Being unsure about things is an unpleasant and uncomfortable position to be in. It makes it impossible for us to settle and get peace of mind. If there are different possibilities, our thoughts can be constantly racing one way or the other trying to establish the truth, just so we can rest or focus on something else.
Confirmation bias can help us find that peace. It helps us to accept beliefs and opinions as truths and facts. We think of truth and lies as natural opposites, but truth and unknowing might be a more common pairing in our experiences.
Anyway, while we hate the discomfort of not being sure of the truth, there’s probably a simpler reason yet for us letting confirmation bias influence our behaviour so much.
Have you ever heard the claim that living creatures are lazy? I think that’s an unreasonable claim that disrespects the miracle of creation, whether you think that miracle was the result of six days of hard work, 6,000 years ago or a big bang almost 14 billion years ago.
Living creatures are frugal, not lazy. When a creature doesn’t know where its next meal is going to come from, taking care not to waste energy becomes vitally important.
Thinking uses energy, so it’s just one other aspect of living that needs to be managed to avoid wasting energy unnecessarily. Obviously, human societies have largely developed to the point where conserving energy is less of an issue, but with such rooted behaviours that could date back 100s of millions of years, it should be no surprise that we’re still acting in a similar way.
Have you heard that something only has to be repeated seven times before it becomes true or something similar? The more often something is repeated as fact, the more convincing it is that it’s true. I’d go further though and say that something can be said just once and become true, as long as the person saying it is trusted.
I think we can trace this back to the evolutionary desire to save energy.
When we’re browsing through our feed on Facebook or the suggested videos on TikTok, it’s not uncommon to see things repeated by different people and organisations. If more than one person is saying the same thing, it’s a natural shortcut to assume that what they’re saying is true. It’s all the more likely on social media where the systems are designed to show us content that we appear to like. Confirmation bias is going to make it even more likely that we’re going to accept things as truth when they’re similar to other things that we like.
It makes it easy for groups to push lies as if they’re truths. We’ve both heard stories about foreign government-backed operations to push false information and later I’ll touch on how The Epoch Times, a newspaper and website that describes itself as trustworthy, has been accused of using multiple fake social media accounts to lend credibility to its news stories.
Coordinated actions aren’t the only examples we need to be aware of. We’ll also see various unconnected people with shared beliefs appear in our feeds and in each other’s feeds, naturally turning untruths into truths. Those posts may have been organic, even though the information they’re sharing may have been seeded by a group to deliberately drive those with an existing bias to share it further.
How many times we have to see something before we accept it as true varies. Both between us as individuals, but also between different circumstances. You may not immediately accept a stranger’s claim as truth unless it closely aligns with your existing beliefs, in which case you may consider them to be wise and worthy of your friendship. However, if someone you know and trust shares something, you may accept it as truth immediately. Even if you only know the person from social media and even, in some rarer cases, if it goes against what you already believe.
Why do you think so many people seem to fall for dating scams? Even people who seem to be capable and intelligent. Desire and trust turbocharge confirmation bias. If we have strong positive feelings for someone, even if we’ve never met them, we could completely change our opinion about something to align with their views. Simply because they trigger an emotional response in us.
Which leads us to one more possible reason we’re subject to the effect of confirmation bias. Status. I’ve said before that most of us desire status, ideally a higher status than those around us.
Possessing knowledge and being able to answer other people’s questions is a form of status. Confirmation bias makes it easier for us to accept beliefs and opinions as facts and truths, which provides us with more knowledge that we can share with others. The possibility of acquiring higher status from others right now, rather than waiting and doing some fact-checking, is too attractive to most of us. This potentially leads to a cycle of more and more people joining together to unintentionally share untruths.
Which Came First, The Belief Or The Arguments?
In my early notes, I’d written about using Russell Brand as an example of how society seems to jump on anybody the moment they’re accused of something rather than waiting for any investigation or court case. That was very much the case in 2023 when Russell Brand faced several accusations of sexual assault and rape and numerous people called for him to be sacked. However, that all fell apart when it turned out he talked about one incident in a recorded radio show just minutes after it occurred.4
Not his finest hour, regardless though, I still think of Russell Brand as the Plato of the 21st century.
Both of them with a strong enough command of language to be able to present a veneer of intelligence, despite at their core level being sheep-dip stupid.
My guess is few people are going to argue with me about my assessment of Brand, particularly in light of his admitting to exposing himself to a woman on the radio. Surely, that really must require a very special type of stupid. Gifted stupid, even.
I suspect there’s going to be rather more seeking to defend to Plato and shoot down my claim. That’s fine, I’ll be the first to admit I’m being a bit clickbaity, though I am going to argue my corner briefly.
Plato doesn’t appear to understand human nature.
He has his vision of a just city or society that comprises three social classes. The Guardians at the top who rule and have to live a subset of a communist-style existence and can’t earn money or acquire personal possessions, then the Auxiliaries who are a class of warriors who do exactly what the Guardians tell them in order to enact their rule and defend the city, even if that means dying, and finally the workers at the bottom, who should be enslaved to Guardians, but don’t worry, it’s all for their own benefit, so that’s fine then.
Ducking mentalist if he believed that’s going to come off in the real world.
Could you think of a more effective way to structure a society to ensure class division and hatred?
At the top, a class who can do nothing but rule an ungrateful bunch of bar stewards who are fortunate to have a productive purpose in life and earn money to buy the latest iSlate or this season’s must-have toga.
At the bottom, a class sick and tired of having no say in how their city is run and having to suck up to the posh, highfaluting bottom-wipes at the top of society.
And stuck in the middle, an angry, well-trained and armed group of nutters hated by those below them and treated with contempt by those above.
And that’s my problem with Plato, if he doesn’t understand how humans think and operate, every theory he put forward that involves humans is based on dodgy intel. Even the three little pigs knew that building with dodgy materials was a recipe for disaster. Well okay, two of them didn’t really get that at the beginning of the story, but the wolf, through the medium of blowing and eating illustrated the concept rather effectively for them.
Anyway, I’ve turned to Plato because I think he illustrates another issue with how we establish truth that plays nicely with confirmation bias. We know what we believe and we go out of our way to formulate arguments that support our beliefs, using the facts that work for us. Misinterpreting stuff that doesn’t quite fit and completely ignoring the rest.
His vision of the just city seems at least in part guided by the ancient Greeks’ religious beliefs, with the gods having a bit of a paternal relationship with humans. His Guardians are a bit like humans playing at being gods. Oh, and they have to live a communist existence. We already know human nature makes a mockery of communism and throwing a load of humans with god complexes into the mix thinking it’ll make things better is about as smart as hitting yourself repeatedly in the face with a hedgehog.
Oh, and the workers are going to love being slaves aren’t they, because everyone wants to be a slave, don’t they? Not to forget the Auxiliaries who have to be prepared to fight and die for the just city. Now, I know I called the even more ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus a dick earlier, but even he knew that 90% of the soldiers fighting a war are a waste of space and a lot of those Auxiliaries may not embrace early and violent death.
Regardless, to my simple little mind, with regard to his perfect city, it seems that Plato knew the end point of where he wanted to end up and then formulated his arguments to ensure they worked towards that point. If someone still regarded as one of history’s great thinkers falls into this trap, I think we should be pretty sure that we’re making the same mistakes too.
A Matter Of Intent
Chances are that most of the untruth shared online and elsewhere is unintentional. It’s people who believe completely in what they say and believe that by sharing it, they’re helping others to see the truth. I’m sure both of us have been guilty of doing exactly that. I know I have been and it was probably motivated by the urge for status in my case. No intent to mislead others, but that was just the unintentional outcome, assuming that anyone actually listened.
The outcome is still undesirable, with untruths being accepted by an ever greater number of people who will also go on to repeat and grow the untruths further.
Ideally we should all be more responsible before ever repeating anything as fact, though it’s probably unrealistic to expect everyone to fact-check everything they hear. But if we all did, we might significantly reduce the chance of us doing the leg work for those deliberately sharing lies and false information.
Those are the people who know that by dividing us, they assume power over us.
Are you happy being a plaything for someone who wants to take advantage of you?
When we blindly repeat lies and spread untruths we hurt ourselves and make the heffalumps stronger and wealthier. We’re just like a Barbie doll or GI Joe or Action Man or Sindy doll or Star Wars action figure, that can be placed where others want and manipulated into any position that suits them.
It may give you peace of mind and make you feel more comfortable in your own head, but wouldn’t you prefer to be more comfortable in the real world? Comfortable knowing you can afford a home, afford to eat healthily when you want and can access the healthcare you need when you need it.
The heffalumps don’t care about you being comfortable in the real world, they only care about their comfort and they know that as long as you surrender to your biases, you’ll spread their lies for them and settle for being comfortable in your own head.
- Some will point out that there is evidence of a difference between white and black Americans in test scores and IQ. This article offers an introduction to the subject and the various complexities of trying to understand the underlying reasons – https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-white-test-score-gap-why-it-persists-and-what-can-be-done/. If you read that article, you’ll see that the gap is closing. If you search specifically on IQ differences, you’ll probably find IQs for black, white and east Asian people stated as about 85, 100 and 106, I’ve also seen one source give an IQ figure of 113 for Jews and 89 for Latinos. Different research studies have reached different conclusions on the degree of these differences being genetic vs cultural. About two-thirds of us have an IQ that fits in the spread of 85 to 113 and obviously there will be a lot of cross-over between the different racial groupings, meaning there are Jews with lower IQs than white people and black people with higher IQs than white people. Additionally, we should note of course that IQ is not a definitive measurement, an individual’s result from testing is only an estimate and if we’re using an imperfect measurement, we should anticipate imperfect results. Considering these points, I feel comfortable in asserting black people are not inferior to white people in the same way I assert white people are not inferior to Jewish or east Asian people. To any white racists who believe that IQ differences offer grounds for discriminating against black people, surely IQ itself offers a fair better basis on which to discriminate ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias ↩︎
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-political-brain/ ↩︎
- https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-66882644 ↩︎