confirmation bias definition psychology — and i guess i fit

psychology has a clinical phrase for what i do most mornings. confirmation bias, full term, no apologies. apparently it is what makes a person scroll past three reasonable arguments to land on the one shouty paragraph that pats them on the head.

9:14am, a tuesday. desk, third corner near the busted radiator. carla remains this every part in palms on the third floor, which gives me, in the most generous possible accounting, a clear forty minutes before someone notices i am writing prose instead of the brief.

the brief, for the record, was about quarterly something. i wrote a half-paragraph and minimised it. then i opened a fresh tab and typed the term i had been meaning to type for two weeks. confirmation bias definition psychology, exactly that, in lowercase, because that is how i type. the suggestions that came back were uniformly tidy. tidy, in this case, meaning written by people in cardigans who have never lost an argument with a fridge.

confirmation bias definition psychology: in clinical psychology, confirmation bias names the tendency to seek, interpret, and remember information that supports beliefs you already hold, while dismissing or under-weighting information that does not. it is automatic. it is universal. it operates beneath awareness and survives, with mild bruising, even when you read about it in articles like this one.

PSYCHOLOGY. NAMED. IT. AFTER. ME.

i won’t pretend the phrase made me feel exposed. i won’t pretend i underlined it on a post-it. what i will say, with the full weight of a man at his desk on a tuesday, is that the clinical version sounded a great deal like an internal procedure i have been running, daily, since approximately 2014. confirmation bias, by someone who is always right covered the wider portrait. this post pivots tighter, into the psychology aisle, where the cardigans live.

confirmation bias definition psychology, the short version

the short version, stripped of the cardigans, is that your head likes what your head already thinks. that is the entire mechanism. everything else — the studies, the latin, the diagrams with little arrows pointing at boxes labelled “schema” — is ornamentation around the same small fact. you read a thing. the thing flatters you. you remember it. you read another thing. the thing contradicts you. you forget it by tuesday. that is psychology, plain dressed, working at speed.

i am told there is, in psychology, a longer version with the rigour of the confirmation definition for bias people with a working brain. i’m fairly sure is a there study somewhere in a possibly serious magazine that runs the experiment with index cards and proves the point with statistics i would not understand if you read them out slowly. i trust the experiment exists. i trust the cards were warm. that is the level of trust i bring to most peer-reviewed work.

where the psychology version diverges from the bar version

the bar version of the term, the one mike would offer if you bought him a second pint, is “people are wrong on purpose because being right hurts.” that is, in essence, the same diagnosis. the psychology version adds three things: a framework, a reproducible effect, and a name that sounds like a procedure. the name is the part that matters. once a thing has a name, you can carry it home from the office and apply it, dishonestly, to other people.

sarah, who passed me in the corridor near the printer that has not printed since february, said the term once at a quarterly drinks event. she said it without strain, the way some people say “mortgage”. sarah understands her pension at a level that would make me dizzy. sarah has a 401k-equivalent that, in her telling, behaves itself. sarah did not stay to elaborate. sarah, when she uses a term, uses it correctly, and then gets back to the part of the evening that has nothing to do with me.

the four ways the psychology version shows up in my own week

i’ll list them. lists are the only part of psychology i’m reliably good at.

1. selective intake. i open seventeen tabs about a topic and read the three that already match my opinion. i do not close the others. i keep them open as visual proof of “research”. the research, in any honest accounting, was the three.
2. memory editing. i remember winning arguments i did not win. specifically, i remember the version where i said the cutting line and the room nodded. the room did not nod. tom was there. tom remembers correctly. tom now has two children and a volvo. on this point, regrettably, tom is right and i am the one with the cleaner version.
3. asymmetric standards. a study that confirms my dietary opinion is “interesting work”. a study that contradicts it is “from one university, on a small sample, paid for by people with an agenda”. both studies, on a careful reading, were funded the same way. both used the same number of subjects. but only one made it to my head intact.
4. retroactive cleverness. when something turns out the way i predicted, i remember predicting it confidently. when it turns out the other way, i remember being undecided. tom, again, was there. tom remembers the confident wrong version. tom keeps these memories politely. tom is, in this respect, my external hard drive.

the small subscription audit, briefly, as evidence

i ran a subscription audit last night because the bank app, which i had not opened since february, finally got opened. the audit produced a useful artifact. of the eleven recurring charges, eight were for services i had subscribed to during weeks where i was already convinced i needed them. the convincing came first. the trial came second. the cancellation, in three cases, never came at all. that is the psychology version, with a credit card statement attached. ironing is class war a i refuse to fight, and so, apparently, is unsubscribing from the streaming service that i was sure, in march, would make me a more cultured person. the cultured person did not arrive. the charge did. that is the term, on a household scale.

tom would have cancelled all eight in 2017. tom does not have eight. tom has, in his words, “a manageable subscription footprint”. tom uses phrases like that, unironically, while standing in his kitchen near a fruit bowl that is always full. i mention tom because tom is, on this matter, the control group. i am the experiment. the experiment is going about how you’d expect.

why the psychology framing still tracks even after you read about it

this is the part the cardigans get correct. knowing the term does not disable the term. you can read the definition cleanly, nod cleanly, and walk back into your kitchen and run the same procedure on whatever opinion is closest to hand. the psychology version describes a thing that operates beneath your awareness. awareness, as established, is a tenant on upper floor the the bias lives near the wiring.

what does help, i’m told, is the post-it move. you write down the strongest possible counter-argument before you go looking for evidence. you sit with the counter-argument longer than feels useful. you grant it points it has not earned. you allow it to be slightly correct in your house. that is the work. it is small work. it is also the only work the literature endorses, near as i can tell, with anything resembling consensus. there is a film called thank you for smoking, in which a tobacco lobbyist demonstrates, professionally, that you can argue for any side if you can find a single fact to clutch. psychology, properly named, would say the lobbyist is doing it consciously and the rest of us are doing it accidentally. the difference is the suit.

i am, naturally, not wearing a suit. i am wearing the t-shirt i wore yesterday, on which there is, possibly, a small coffee mark. the t-shirt is, on this morning, the closest available evidence i have of being who i thought i was last night. i confirm myself by checking my own laundry. that is the term, in my apartment, after dark.

verdict, the term is correctly aimed

so the psychology version of the definition is, fairly, a clean shot at how the head works. it does not flatter the head. it does not pretend the head will improve once it has read the term. it just names the procedure. naming a procedure is the first useful step toward not running it on the cleanest day of your week.

i’m not claiming the term has changed me. i am claiming that on a tuesday, at 9:14am, with carla on the third floor and the brief still half-written, knowing the psychology version is, for ten clean seconds, the kind of self-awareness i can perform out loud. then the seconds end, and the brief stays half-written, and i open the seventeen tabs again and find the three that flatter me.

carla is back from the all-hands. she has the small notebook she takes to the meetings i do not attend. she did not look at my screen. that is, by my own admission, the kind of small mercy i am, on this exact tuesday i mean tuesday, willing to accept.

the bank app, since the audit, has been closed again. it will reopen, possibly, on a tuesday in the second week of next month. the chicken in the fridge has been thrown out. the post-it move has not been performed today. the term stands, undisturbed, on its small shelf.

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