The Battle Against Biases

The biggest difficulty in navigating our everyday deluge of information is avoiding the trap of cognitive biases. It disturbs me that people fall into these traps easily, most notably confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias rears its ugly head every time we notice a 'confirmation' or 'prove' of an unsubstantiated belief. Say, you happen to drink a lot of beer after work with your friends one day. On reaching home you felt some stomach discomfort and had to relief yourself in the toilet. The next day, you had a late night whiskey session with another group of friends after dinner. You went home and had a nice sleep that day. A couple of days later, you again go out for beers with your office mates. This time, you go home to the some stomach discomfort.

What can you conclude from this experience? Drinking whiskey is better because beer gives us diarrhea? I have a friend who believes just that. He had a few bad experiences drinking beer after work and he arrives at the theory that his body cannot take beer anymore. Nowadays, he only goes for whiskey.

But I've been drinking beer with this friend of mine for many years and never had I heard him complain about it. What changed? It so happened that another friend told him that he got diarrhea after drinking beer, which made him recall that he himself experienced the same thing before. There you have your confirmation: drinking beer causes diarrhea. Did they consider the possibility that perhaps on those occasions that they were drinking beer, they were doing it with an empty stomach? Perhaps that is the cause of their stomach discomfort? No, the beer theory is more sexy.

We like to come to easy 'truths' like that. Once we have latched on to our favourite theory, we only notice incidences that support it and ignore cases which don't. A lot of superstitions take hold that way. They discount the role that chance plays every time a 'confirmation' of a theory occurs.

More often than not, people only needs one or two data points to form an opinion. How often have you heard people say the food at a particular restaurant sucks after only sampling one particular meal?

In a way, we can't help it. The human mind likes to simply the world around us so that it is easier for us to make decisions. We like to box and pigeonhole things after one or two experiences, so that when we encounter the same situation again, we can make a quick judgement. We don't like uncertainty and nuances. We like binary decisions. Yes or no. Good or bad. This or that. Tye make the world so much simpler for us.

I try to notice these mental biases in my everyday life. The mind simply loves to latch on to biased opinions because it feels good to be certain. You feel decisive, even authoritative. Everything fits in nicely into boxes. But unfortunately the world is not like that. It is continuous, messy and full of nuances. To see that world clearly, one has to battle against these natural mental biases. Believing this could be another biased opinion of mine. But the difference is that: I am totally aware of it.