Confirmation bias in formation of interpretations
Edwin Hutchins, Cognition_in_the_Wild
Confirmation bias is
a propensity to affirm prior interpretations and to discount, ignore, or
reinterpret evidence that runs counter to an already -formed interpretation. It is a bias to confirm an already-held
hypothesis about the nature of the world. This is a common sense notion. We talk about the difficulty of changing someone's
mind once it is "made up."
The importance of " first impressions "
is an obvious corollary of our folk belief in this principle. There is also compelling scientific evidence
of the generality of confirmation bias across such areas as attribution,
personality traits (Hastie and Kumar 1979), logical inference tasks (Wason 1968;
Wason and Johnson-Laird 1972), beliefs about important social issues (Lord et
ale 1979), and scientific reasoning (Fleck 1979; Tweney et ale 1981).
To the extent that
this propensity to stick with prior interpretations and discount disconfirming
evidence often leads us to maintain
faulty interpretations of the nature of the world, it seems
maladaptive.
After all, knowing what is going on in
the environment is an important ability for any creature, and, in general, the more
complex the creature, the more complex is that creature 's
sense of
what is in the environment. A property
of cognitive processing that prevents us complex creatures from finding better
interpretations once we have a good one seems very maladaptive
indeed. Why, then, would such a property survive ?
Clearly there must be a tradeoff here between the ability to move from one
interpretation to a better one and the need to have an interpretation -
any
interpretation - in order to coordinate with events in the environment .
A system that
maintains a coherent but suboptimal interpretation may be better able to adapt
than a system that tears its interpretations apart as fast as it builds them.
...
That is,
some ways of organizing people around thinking tasks will lead to an exacerbation
of the maladaptive aspects of this property of mental systems, whereas other
forms of organization will actually make an adaptive virtue on the group level
of what appears to be an individual vice.
