How to Protect Against Confirmation Bias

This is a three-part series on Confirmation Bias. If you are new here, welcome! You can read part one here and part two here.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been talking to you about confirmation bias.

I’ve explained what it is, and why it can wreak so much havoc in your financial life. What we need to talk about now is how you deal with it!

And this is the moment where, if I were sitting across the table from you, I would look you straight in the eye and say, “my friend, it’s incredibly hard.”

Confirmation bias is insidious. It seems to sneak into everything we do. So this isn’t going to be easy.

But today, I want to share the only technique I’ve come across that seems to help.

I call it the Confirmation Bias Prevention Program. Here’s how it works:

1- Find someone who disagrees with a decision you’re about to make.
2- Ask them why they disagree with you.
3- Carefully listen to what they have to say. Listen, as Steven Covey says, “with the goal to understand, not to be understood.” You’re there to learn, not to teach, change, preach, or protect yourself.
4- Continue listening until you can honestly say, “I now understand why you believe that.”

That’s it, it’s that simple… but not easy. This is actually very difficult because it requires you to open yourself up to the chance you may be wrong.

We have a label for people like that in the political world: we call them flip-floppers, and that’s negative.

But in the real world, the world of human beings, we call those people empathetic, and that’s positive.

Guarding against confirmation bias is hard. It’s work. It may cause you extra effort, and it may damage your ego.

But that’s a small price to pay for the peace of mind that comes from knowing you have carefully considered alternative viewpoints, and the decisions you’ve made are backed up with actual research.

Every week in the Behavior Gap email, I cover a topic like money, creativity, happiness, or health with a simple sketch and a few hand-crafted words. Each newsletter will take you less than 2 minutes to read, but you’ll be thinking about it all day. Sign up here.