2/7/2017 How to overcome bias – Mind Hacks

Mind Hacks
Neuroscience and psychology news and views.

How to overcome bias

How do you persuade somebody of the facts? Asking them to be fair, impartial
and unbiased is not enough. To explain why, psychologist Tom Sta ord analyses
a classic scienti c study.

One of the tricks our mind plays is to highlight evidence which con rms what we
already believe. If we hear gossip about a rival we tend to think “I knew he was a
nasty piece of work”; if we hear the same about our best friend we’re more likely
to say “that’s just a rumour”. If you don’t trust the government then a change of
policy is evidence of their weakness; if you do trust them the same change of
policy can be evidence of their inherent reasonableness.

Once you learn about this mental habit – called con rmation bias – you start
seeing it everywhere.

This matters when we want to make better decisions. Con rmation bias is OK as
long as we’re right, but all too often we’re wrong, and we only pay attention to the
deciding evidence when it’s too late.

How we should to protect our decisions from con rmation bias depends on why,
psychologically, con rmation bias happens. There are, broadly, two possible
accounts and a classic experiment from researchers at Princeton University pits
the two against each other, revealing in the process a method for overcoming bias.

The rst theory of con rmation bias is the most common. It’s the one you can
detect in expressions like “You just believe what you want to believe”, or “He
would say that, wouldn’t he?” or when the someone is accused of seeing things a

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particular way because of who they are, what their job is or which friends they
have. Let’s call this the motivational theory of con rmation bias. It has a clear
prescription for correcting the bias: change people’s motivations and they’ll stop
being biased.

The alternative theory of con rmation bias is more subtle. The bias doesn’t exist
because we only believe what we want to believe, but instead because we fail to ask
the correct questions about new information and our own beliefs. This is a less
neat theory, because there could be one hundred reasons why we reason
incorrectly – everything from limitations of memory to inherent faults of logic.
One possibility is that we simply have a blindspot in our imagination for the ways
the world could be di erent from how we rst assume it is. Under this account the
way to correct con rmation bias is to give people a strategy to adjust their
thinking. We assume people are already motivated to nd out the truth, they just
need a better method. Let’s call this the cognition theory of con rmation bias.

Thirty years ago, Charles Lord and colleagues published a classic experiment
which pitted these two methods against each other. Their study used a persuasion
experiment which previously had shown a kind of con rmation bias they called
‘biased assimilation’. Here, participants were recruited who had strong pro- or
anti-death penalty views and were presented with evidence that seemed to
support the continuation or abolition of the death penalty. Obviously, depending
on what you already believe, this evidence is either con rmatory or
discon rmatory. Their original nding showed that the nature of the evidence
didn’t matter as much as what people started out believing. Con rmatory evidence
strengthened people’s views, as you’d expect, but so did discon rmatory evidence.
That’s right, anti-death penalty people became more anti-death penalty when
shown pro-death penalty evidence (and vice versa). A clear example of biased
reasoning.

For their follow-up study, Lord and colleagues re-ran the biased assimilation
experiment, but testing two types of instructions for assimilating evidence about
the e ectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent for murder. The motivational
instructions told participants to be “as objective and unbiased as possible”, to
consider themselves “as a judge or juror asked to weigh all of the evidence in a fair
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and impartial manner”. The alternative, cognition-focused, instructions were silent

on the desired outcome of the participants’ consideration, instead focusing only on
the strategy to employ: “Ask yourself at each step whether you would have made
the same high or low evaluations had exactly the same study produced results on
the other side of the issue.” So, for example, if presented with a piece of research
that suggested the death penalty lowered murder rates, the participants were
asked to analyse the study’s methodology and imagine the results pointed the
opposite way.

They called this the “consider the opposite” strategy, and the results were
striking. Instructed to be fair and impartial, participants showed the exact same
biases when weighing the evidence as in the original experiment. Pro-death
penalty participants thought the evidence supported the death penalty. Anti-death
penalty participants thought it supported abolition. Wanting to make unbiased
decisions wasn’t enough. The “consider the opposite” participants, on the other
hand, completely overcame the biased assimilation e ect – they weren’t driven to
rate the studies which agreed with their preconceptions as better than the ones
that disagreed, and didn’t become more extreme in their views regardless of which
evidence they read.

The nding is good news for our faith in human nature. It isn’t that we don’t want
to discover the truth, at least in the microcosm of reasoning tested in the
experiment. All people needed was a strategy which helped them overcome the
natural human short-sightedness to alternatives.

The moral for making better decisions is clear: wanting to be fair and objective
alone isn’t enough. What’s needed are practical methods for correcting our limited
reasoning – and a major limitation is our imagination for how else things might
be. If we’re lucky, someone else will point out these alternatives, but if we’re on
our own we can still take advantage of crutches for the mind like the “consider the
opposite” strategy.

This is my BBC Future column from last week. You can read the original here. My ebook For
argument’s sake: Evidence that reason can change minds is out now.

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 tomstafford / February 7, 2017 / Reasoning

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