Related: Jess Whittlestone’s PhD thesis, titled “The importance of making assumptions: why confirmation is not necessarily a bias.”
I realised that most of the findings commonly cited as evidence for confirmation bias were much less convincing than they first seemed. In large part, this was because the complex question of what it really means to say that something is a ‘bias’ or ‘irrational’ is unacknowledged by most studies of confirmation bias. Often these studies don’t even state what standard of rationality they were claiming people were ‘irrational’ with respect to, or what better judgements might look like. I started to come across more and more papers suggesting that findings classically thought of demonstrating a confirmation bias might actually be interpreted as rational under slightly different assumptions—and found often these papers had much more convincing arguments, based on more thorough theories of rationality.
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[I came to] conclusions I would not have expected myself to be sympathetic to a few years ago: that the extent to which our prior beliefs influence reasoning may well be adaptive across a range of scenarios given the various goals we are pursuing, and that it may not always be better to be ‘more open-minded’. It’s easy to say that people should be more willing to consider alternatives and less influenced by what they believe, but much harder to say how one does this. Being a total ‘blank slate’ with no assumptions or preconceptions is not a desirable or realistic starting point, and temporarily ‘setting aside’ one’s beliefs and assumptions whenever it would be useful to consider alternatives is incredibly cognitively demanding, if possible to do at all. There are tradeoffs we have to make, between the benefits of certainty and assumptions, and the benefits of having an ‘open mind’, that I had not acknowledged before.
Related: Jess Whittlestone’s PhD thesis, titled “The importance of making assumptions: why confirmation is not necessarily a bias.”