unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [33]
When Baron asked fifty-four University of Pennsylvania students to prepare for a discussion of the morality of abortion, he found, as expected, that they tended to list arguments on only one side of the question. What was even more revealing, the students who made one-sided arguments also rated the arguments of others as being of better quality when those other arguments were all on one side, too, even arguments on the opposing side. He concluded: “People consider one-sided thinking to be better than two-sided thinking, even for forming one’s own opinion on an issue.”
General Norman Schwarzkopf fell into the confirmation bias trap after leading U.S. forces to one of the most lopsided military victories in history during the Gulf War in 1991. As Colin Powell tells it in his autobiography, My American Journey, Schwarzkopf appeared at a news conference with video that he said showed a U.S. smart bomb hitting Iraqi Scud missile launchers. When Powell informed him that an analyst had identified the targets as fuel trucks, not missile launchers, Schwarzkopf exploded. “By God, those certainly were Scuds. That analyst doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s just not as good as the others.” Powell says later examination showed that the analyst was right. Schwarzkopf just couldn’t see it. Believing that his forces were really hitting Scud launchers, he was open only to evidence that confirmed his belief.
Even scholars are affected by this powerful bias. In the 1980s, the National Institute of Education (NIE) asked six scholars to conduct an analysis of existing research into the effects of desegregated schools. Two of the scholars were thought to favor school integration, two to oppose it, and two to be neither opponents nor proponents. Sure enough, the differences in their findings were consistent with their ideological predispositions. The differences were slight, which is a testament to the power of the scientific method to rein in bias. But the bias was there nonetheless.
Once you know about confirmation bias, it is easy to detect in others. Confirmation bias was at work when CIA analysts rejected evidence that Iraq had really destroyed its chemical and biological weapons and gave weight only to signs that Saddam Hussein retained hidden stockpiles. Confirmation bias explains why so many people believe in psychics and astrologers: they register only the apparently accurate predictions and ignore those that miss. Confirmation bias explains why, once someone has made a bad first impression on a date or during a job interview, that impression is so hard to live down. And it is because of confirmation bias that good scientists try actively to disprove their own theories: otherwise, it would be just too easy to see only the supporting evidence.
To avoid this psychological trap, apply a bit of the scientific method to political claims and marketing messages. When they sound good, ask yourself what fact could prove them untrue and what evidence you may be failing to consider. You may find that a partisan or dogmatic streak is keeping you from seeing facts clearly.
The “I Know I’m Right” Trap
There’s evidence that the more misinformed we are, the more strongly we insist that we’re correct. In a fascinating piece of research published in 2000, the political psychologist James H. Kuklinski and his colleagues reported findings from a random telephone survey of 1,160 Illinois residents. They found few who were very well informed about the facts of the welfare system: only 3 percent got more than half the questions right. That wasn’t very surprising, but what should be a warning to us all is this: those holding the least accurate beliefs were the ones expressing the highest confidence in those beliefs.
Of those who said correctly that only 7 percent of American families were getting welfare, just under half said they were very confident