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Motivated Reasoning
A Natural History of Confirmation Bias
A deeper look at confirmation bias and how we can address it.
Posted February 5, 2020 Reviewed by Daniel Lyons M.A.
We think we want freedom, not determinism, but really we want both selectively. We want freedom to climb and determinism to keep us from falling – no ceiling to limit our rise but yes please, a solid floor to keep us from falling. We don't want a ceiling and trap doors. What we really want is a ratchet, every lift becoming locked.
Organisms have to work to keep going; to stay alive and aloft, all organisms lift and lock, lift and lock.
"Ratchet Jaw" was an old CB radio handle for people who talk a lot, but the term’s meaning runs deeper.
We have our consuming metabolisms, our protective membranes (like skin and bark), and our orifices including jaws. We open our jaws to take in the energy and material we need for self-regeneration; we close our jaws to prevent self-degeneration. All organisms interact with their environments selectively. It's not just that their environments select.
In fact, natural selection isn't selecting. It's actually natural degeneration, the tendency for things to fall as they would in your life if you weren't hustling to keep your life aloft. No, the business end of life is organisms with their selective interaction within their environments, input orifices that let in what helps, not harms, keeping out what harms, not helps. Outflow orifices too, dispelling what harms not helps, while keeping in what helps not harms.
Those would be the obvious requirements in an entropic universe: Regenerate what breaks down while preventing breakdown. With evolution, it's survival of those best at selective interaction, opening their jaws to take in what helps them regenerate them, closing their jaws to keep out what degenerates them.
Now, humans have all that going on biologically, but they also have it going on at the level of the mind, language, thought, and technology. Though some people talk about being open to all ideas, no one is truly open to everything.
Some ideas feel like letting in toxins that would degenerate our hopes, our resolve. So we don’t ingest them or if we have ingested them, we dispell them. We close our eyes and ears to them or we talk over them. We rationalize. We don’t want to face what feels cognitively and conceptually degenerative, only what feels regenerative. In other words, we’d prefer a ratchet. We want to climb not fall. We want to keep out ideas that demote us and let in ideas that promote us.
This is called confirmation bias and I argue this is an extension of what life has been doing all along.
An extension, yet in a different register. See, with words and ideas we’re not just dealing with reality. With words, you can picture anything real or imagined. You can embrace ideas grounded to reality or ideas totally ungrounded.
That’s a problem. In their cultural selective interaction, people can take in completely unrealistic uplifting ideas and keep out important realistic ones. We can become legends in our own minds and surround ourselves with yes-men and mutual admiration societies that become cults of self-affirmation.
Normal, decent, OK people, of whom there is a vast cultural diversity, intuit that confirmation bias is a problem. We recognize it first from watching other people be stubborn, unwilling to face realities. Soon, we figure out that that could be the case with us too.
We get conscientious about it, wincing a little when we are too quick to dismiss, deflect or ignore discouraging words. We try to distinguish reality from fantasy not that we don’t indulge in both. We just know their place. We never overcome confirmation bias completely but we work on it, for example returning later to apologize to someone for not listening. We try to counter our confirmation bias.
There are whole communities built around just that. Science is an ambitious attempt to counter and thereby neutralize confirmation bias. That’s why the scientific method has been so realistic, adaptive, and productive. Countering confirmation bias has made the modern world. It’s evidence that we can become more adaptive if we only recognize that confirmation bias is a problem we all have to address.
And then there are total "jerks" of whom there is a vast cultural diversity. Some are part-time total jerks – total jerk hobbyists, and some are full-time total jerks.
Where decent people see confirmation bias as a problem for all of us, total jerks see their confirmation bias as the solution to all problems.
Total jerks take in whatever they can consume to regenerate (reaffirm) their beliefs and they keep out whatever would degenerate (disconfirm) their beliefs. They are master ratchet jawers at the conceptual level. They use the least amount of conceptual energy for self-advancement: Lift and lock, lift and lock.
And of course, they’d be the death of us because as humans, unlike life overall, they don't focus on their survival in the real world, only in the ungrounded world of words and ideas, which includes all of un-reality too. They ratchet up through escapism which can't escape reality for long.
