I’m not sure why, but I had a view that confirmation bias was sometimes referred to as “the mother of all biases”. In writing this post I googled “mother of all biases” and got numerous hits, but not only for confirmation bias; in fact, the first hit was for overconfidence bias and I also found hits for the anchoring effect. I chose to focus on the confirmation bias and ignore the other hits. In so doing, unintentionally illustrating the subject of this post in a simple and obvious way!

Read the text below and answer “who is he?”.

Recently, a visionary who helped shape the digital era passed away after a long battle with cancer and heart disease. He made significant contributions to the industry (e.g. developed a unique Operating System) and was revered by the computing community.

I have run this activity for workshop participants many times. Invariably about two thirds of the participants answer “Steve Jobs”. And then I ask those with that answer whether they thought that Jobs had heart disease. Most say no. For those who answer Jobs and don’t think he had heart disease, they all agree to reading the text, forming an opinion that it could be Jobs after the first eleven or so words, then having that opinion strengthen after the next few words, then when encountering “heart disease” feeling a bit unsettled, but continuing nevertheless and then having their opinion reinforced by the last sentence.

In case you’re wondering, the correct answer is Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the Unix operating system.

Insight:

We form beliefs first, we then develop explanations for those beliefs.

In “The Believing Brain” [1], Michael Shermer lays out his thesis: “We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, personal, emotional, and psychological reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture, and society at large; after forming our beliefs we then defend, justify, and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments, and rational explanations. Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow.”

Shermer defines confirmation bias as “the tendency to seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignore or reinterpret disconfirming evidence”.

Implication:

I think the term “the mother of all biases” is fitting when one considers that the confirmation bias has been implicated in so many failures including the Great Financial Crisis, BP Deepwater Horizon, the Everest 1996 tragedy, and the high

failure rate of M&A transactions.

Imperative:

What should we do about the mother of all biases?

Karl Popper: “The discovery of instances which confirm a theory means very little if we have not tried, and failed, to discover refutations.” Popper goes on to say “for if we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favour of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.” [2]

Kahneman builds on this when he says, “Contrary to the rules of philosophers of science, who advise testing hypotheses by trying to refute them, people (and scientists quite often) seek data that are likely to be compatible with the beliefs they currently hold.” [3]

While it is not easy to do, because it goes against how our minds work, to counteract confirmation bias we must actively look for disconfirming evidence.

To close using the words of the great Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”

References:

[1] “The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths”, Michael Shermer

[2] “The Poverty of Historicism”, Karl Popper

[3] “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, Daniel Kahneman