Confirmation Bias and Challenging Our Beliefs

By questioning ourselves, we become not only more sympathetic, but also more knowledgeable

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”

— Morpheus, The Matrix

I am currently reading Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s celebrated book on America’s current and historical race relations that is presented as a letter to his son. The writing is beautiful and elegant, with powerful sentences that convey stark images clearly and forcefully.

I’m a white male that was raised in a comfortable home surrounded by acres of land and while I later lived in an inner city next door to drug dealers and drug addicts, I was an adult at the time and never really feared for my life. So I cannot relate to everything in the book, nor should I. After all, it’s not meant for me. But I also don’t subscribe to everything in it, either. And that’s fine. Just because my thoughts don’t align perfectly with Coates’s doesn’t mean that he failed as a writer or I failed as a reader. Quite the opposite, in fact. It is precisely because I do not share these thoughts that it’s important that I read it and understand what Coates is conveying. Books let you enter the mind of a writer and when that writer’s experience and worldview are different than your own, you gain a much broader understanding of the world and those that inhabit it. Whether you agree or not is irrelevant.

What’s the point of reading and seeking knowledge, if all you’re doing is learning the same things over and over again? That’s not growth.

Unfortunately, most of us don’t seem to want to grow. Confirmation bias is defined as “The tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories” and that’s exactly what many people seek, particularly online. It seems counterintuitive because the rise of the Internet has connected parts of the globe that are separated by oceans so we are more exposed to other people and cultures now than at any time in history, but what it has really done is bring like-minded people together and convince them that they were right all along and everyone that disagrees with them is wrong.

We have all of the information from the history of the world at our fingertips, yet from politics to sports to relationships to religion, many of us only seek out information to support our already established — and often inflexible — beliefs to use in an argument. Instead, we should gain knowledge first and then build our belief structure from that foundation.

But very few of us do this. Why?

Because confirmation bias is comforting. We’re a nation of babies and being reassured over and over again that what we believe is the only truth is a pacifier and a warm blanket. Conversely, the opposite — learning something that completely changes the way you see the world, yourself, or both — is terrifying. It means not only that you were wrong, but that on some level, your life was a lie.

Most people choose the blue pill and believe whatever we want to believe.