Confirmation Bias: I see it everywhere

Once I learned about Confirmation Bias I started seeing it everywhere.

Confirmation bias is like that. It wasn't until I bought an old Volvo station wagon that I began seeing them all over. Suddenly everyone was driving a Volvo. Or was it just me? Well, there are actually two things going on here. One is what psychologists call Inattentional Blindness. In inattentional blindness we simply fail to see certain aspects of our environment because we are paying attention to other things. There are lots of experiments showing this feature of our visual system, but the most famous is the selective attention test involving six people passing two basketballs around. By now you've probably seen it, but if you have not, then go ahead and watch it now:

Inattentional blindness is not confirmation bias, but the two seem closely related to me. If you have not been paying attention to something in your environment you will probably discount it from how you figure the world really is. But once you notice it, then you might even start looking for it. At this point you've moved into the realm of confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is accused of causing all kinds of problems. It apparently affects us constantly as we go about our lives. But there are ways around it. Scientists are very worried about how it can interfere with empirical [based on observation] research. The empirical method is one of the basic building blocks of modern science so a human bias that interferes with that can do a lot of damage to the scientific enterprise.

My favorite way of thinking about science is to conceive of it as an ongoing attempt at overcoming human biases. Scientists have been developing more and more sophisticated ways of using statistical methods to make sure their data collection is a true random sample (or as close to random as possible). In medicine they use double-blind experimental methods to make sure the person conducting the research does not know who is receiving which medicine, and therefore she cannot knowingly, or unknowingly influence the experiment. There are other methods used for overcoming confirmation bias, but perhaps the most powerful method that the scientific method espouses is independent confirmation. If one team of researchers does a study and finds a particular result they then publish their research so that other teams can try to replicate the study. If no one can replicate it then the scientific community as a whole will not accept the conclusions of the original research. This is why scientific consensus is the greatest proof of a theory.

There's something you can do to help you start to mitigate the effects of confirmation bias as well as other biases bouncing around in your head: start a surprise journal. Get yourself a journal and start taking note of things that surprise you; things you don't expect. Look at these things. They can be clues to ways in which your own thinking might need to be changed.

My wife and I were driving down the 75 to Atlanta one spring and, being from Chicago, she said that there were a lot more license plates from Illinois than from other northern states. Suspecting confirmation bias at work I told her to get out a piece of paper and start keeping track of every northern license plate we came across. This is really the best to be sure that your observations are accurate. By the time got Atlanta she had one more license plate from Illinois than from Indiana. So, although she actually did get more Illinois license plates, she was surprised at how many Indiana vehicles she wasn't noticing.

So if you're really curious, you have to do the hard work of keeping track of everything. This is easy while driving down a freeway for a couple hours. It gets a lot harder when keeping track of every encounter you have with other people for months on end in order to figure out if the full moon really does cause people to act strangely. That's why so many people continue to believe that the full moon actually has a real effect. Even though it has been studied numerous times and there's no statistically significant differences between when the moon is full and when it is not, many people continue to notice more strange behavior.

On Not Knowing Ourselves

One of the reasons people study psychology and even philosophy is because they want to know more about themselves. But it's not as easy as we first think it's going to be.

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates says:

"But I have no leisure for them at all; and the reason, my friend, is this: I am not yet able, as the Delphic inscription has it, to know myself; so it seems to me ridiculous, when I do not yet know that, to investigate irrelevant things."

Or as Wittgenstein says:

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”

OK, I can't help it. One more quote, this time from Confucius:

"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."

And there are a lot more quotes like this by the likes of Shakespeare, Darwin, Bertrand Russel, etc. I think I know what's going on here. Intelligent, thoughtful, and educated people run into a lot of less skilled (ok, I really mean idiots) who think they have everything figured out. So they offer some advice and, hopefully, try to live up to it themselves.

I'm sure we've all run across these kinds of people. All you have to do is read a few comments below almost any article on the Internet. How is it that such stupid people can be so blissfully unaware of their ignorance?

One aspect of knowing ourselves is understanding our abilities and limitations. How intelligent are you? How good are you at reasoning, observing, understanding others, coping with difficulties, telling jokes? These, and many more questions, require us to have some sense of our own abilities as well as some sense of the abilities of others. But it turns out that we are really bad at this. One (but there are many more) of the reason's knowing ourselves is so hard is because we often overestimate our own abilities. And this is especially true when we are most incompetent. My goal isn't to seek a way out of the cave. What I'm interested in is finding a better way of navigating this world we live in. Enter David Dunning and Justin Kruger. They have actually put these things to the test, the empirical test, that is.

You Are Not So Smart has a nice interview with David Dunning. Dunning is best known for his part in developing the Dunning-Kruger effect which goes a long way toward explaining why it's so hard to live up to the Delphic maxim.  They describe it this way in their original paper:

"People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it."

Or, as the abstract to another article says:

"Successful negotiation of everyday life would seem to require people to possess insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills. However, people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence. This lack of awareness arises because poor performers are doubly cursed: Their lack of skill deprives them not only of the ability to produce correct responses, but also of the expertise necessary to surmise that they are not producing them. People base their perceptions of performance, in part, on their preconceived notions about their skills. Because these notions often do not correlate with objective performance, they can lead people to make judgments about their performance that have little to do with actual accomplishment."

What jumps out to me from the graphs in their paper is that most people just generally see themselves as slightly above average. Most people -- on average, and no matter what their actual competence -- tend to see themselves as somewhere between 60% and 70%. I must be especially prone to the Dunning-Kruger effect since I used to see myself coming in just around 80-90% in most areas of my life. Even though I know it's impossible for me to be that good in everything. Actually, I've never seen myself as good in art, music, and language learning. In everything else I was always sure I was better than you.

The thing is, I know that this can't actually be true. So I try, in all things, to live by the Principle of Fallibility. Basically, I could be wrong. I've been wrong before. I will be wrong in the future. What's to say that I'm not wrong now. If even most published scientific studies are wrong, what could protect me from the same fate? So now I rate myself much lower in most things, especially things I don't really have proper training in. But it's still hard not to see myself as above average. It's such a hard delusion to overcome. It might be that the only way to really overcome it is to become depressed. It's called Depressive Realism, but not everyone buys into it and I'm not planning on trying it anytime soon.

Since I'm too lazy to make my own YouTube videos, I offer this nicely done explanation of the Dunning-Kruger effect:

What I like about the TheraminTrees video above is that he points out that we can do something to improve the situation:

• Training. I guess that if we could actually get out competence up to 60% then we'd have a more accurate assessment of ourselves. 
• Independent feedback. If you aren't sure what your skill level is in something, and you could find an independently graded test in that area or find some people who might be capable of telling you the truth, this might be able to help your assessment. That is, if you believe it. The problem here is that people really close to the bottom don't seem to learn much from being exposed to the truth. 
• I think this is what college really offers to students. When we read a book or even two or twenty books on a subject we feel like we have mastered the material. It's not until we take an exam or write a paper and turn it in for a grade that our self-understanding can be challenged. College forces us to face the challenge. If we are willing to listen to the feedback we can grow. 
• Publishing on the Internet can also open us up to critics that might challenge our own self assessment. It can be intimidating. I'm intimidated right now. Who knows what's going to happen after I hit the Publish button?

I would also add that developing certain intellectual virtues could help mitigate the effects. Especially

• Intellectual Humility:  Unfortunately, what I find most of the time is that what we really think is that if other people had intellectual humility they would see that I was right. This isn't the type of humility I'm talking about. For one, humility does not seek to humiliate or demonize the other. Humility is to open ourselves up to learn. There's a lot we don't know and a lot of ways in which what we think we know could be wrong. Keep that in mind next time you read a Wikipedia article. Have you also read all the references at the bottom of the page? If you haven't then how much can you really understand. The article is just the tip of the iceberg. 
• Intellectual Courage: Courage is the hardest virtue of all. It takes great courage to question our own cherished beliefs. I was looking for a YouTube video on intellectual humility and found a video by a Muslim encouraging his fellow believers to have more humility. But what he actually was espousing was not humility at all. He first accused unbelievers of vanity for getting a PhD just so they can put Dr. in front of their name, but then told his followers not to question Islamic scholars because they have studies far longer than you have. I don't know if you can see the irony in this, but it occurs to me that he doesn't have the courage to question his own beliefs and therefore humility is just abstraction with no traction in the real world. 

If you want to know more about Dunning's work go to the Self and Social Insight (SaSI) Lab.

Question: Do people who actually think they are below the fifty percentile ever start academically oriented blogs? Isn't it a requirement that you think you know more than other people if you are going to start a blog that concerns critical thinking skills and philosophical investigations?

Out of the Cave

It seems like whenever anyone reads Plato's Allegory of the Cave from the Republic, they always see themselves as in the light and anyone who disagrees with them as in the cave.

Here's a simple claymation rendering of the allegory.

Plato used this as an illustration of how his Forms exist on a higher level of reality than what we experience in our day-to-day lives.

Here's a longer (nine and a half minute) explanation of the allegory.

Basically, what Tim Wilson is pointing out in the video is that, although most people just read the Allegory of the Cave by itself, it helps to read the context in which it appears in the Republic. We need to know something about the Analogy of the Sun, and the Analogy of the Divided Line. This broader discussion is not what I'm interested in here, so I'll just let you read the Wikipedia articles on them if you want.

Wittgenstein and the problem of getting out of the cave

The problem of getting outside of the cave is similar to the problem of the blind men and the elephant. Both stories rely on some perspective outside of human possibility. For example, if the blind men and the elephant are used to show us that reality is different from what we each experience in our limited capacities, then that is assuming that there is a perspective outside of human experience. This perspective could only come from a super-human vantage point; a God's eye view. In the story, the king can see the whole elephant so the blind men look ridiculous with their limited experience. But we don't have that view, so all we can know is the limited experience of collective humanity. We can get outside of our individual perspective, but we cannot get outside of the experiences of the human race. (Lesslie Newbigin makes this same point.)

Wittgenstein does not tackle these things explicitly, but his thinking shows us the same thing. He uses the term "Form of Life," by which he could be taken to mean two different things, but for our purposes I appeal to his use as shared human behavior. The human form of life is the grounds by which we can speak to each other and learn from each other. This human form of life is based in what it means biologically to be a human being, but also socially in what he means to be embedded in a human culture using human languages to communicate. As he says,

"So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?" -- It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 241) 

In this section, Wittgenstein imagines someone questioning his philosophy, to which he answers that, in the wider sense that I take him, humans come to agreement within their form of life. This form of life is common to all humans since it is based on our biological makeup, but can differ some in terms of social and cultural embeddedness.

So Plato's cave is an allegory based on the presupposition that we can transcend the human form of life in which we are all trapped. There is no perspective outside the cave. It turns out the the king and his courtiers are also blind.

Just a couple thoughts on why I take Wittgenstein to mean biological makeup. There's one line in Wittgenstein where he says that if a lion could talk we could not understand it. Here's an entertaining discussion of that every same quote:

And here is a rather funny, if not informative, comic about Wittgenstein's lion.

Chaerephon

Chaerephon was a friend of Socrates. He went to the oracle of Delphi to ask if there was anyone wiser that Socrates to which the oracle basically said, No. In the Gorgias by Plato, he seems to have enjoyed lingering in the Agora discussing philosophy and learning from Sorcrates.

That's my aim. To listen, discuss, and learn.