Self-Confirming Ignorance

Something has been bothering me lately and it has to do with the vast chasm between what we think we know and what we actually know. I’ve been noticing my (and others’) tendency to believe something to be true and then seek out facts to confirm what s already believed. A simple example is that if I watch the news, my tendency is to never watch FOX news, since that program has a much more conservative (read Republican) bent to it, while I see myself as being much more liberal. The problem with that is that I am deliberately seeking information which confirms the worldview which I have already formed rather than seeking contrary information to broaden or challenge my perspective. The more I am aware of this tendency, the more I see it in life:

• I don’t go for a walk in the rain because I already believe it won’t be as pleasurable
• I buy the things I know I like at the grocery store and shy away from new items
• I seek out and maintain friendships with like-minded people.
• I read movie reviews that I agree with and stop short of completing reviews I disagree with
• I’ll form an opinion of someone and allow in all the information confirming that opinion and downplay contradictory information

It appears that I am pre-wired to confirm my beliefs rather than to challenge them.

I see it all the time in others as well:

• Rush Limbaugh “dittoheads” who keep listening to this man on the radio despite his obviously wrong (here I go again) positions
• Holocaust non-believers who filter out information which doesn’t support their belief structures
• A large proportion of African Americans believe OJ Simpson was innocent of murdering Ron and Nicole Goodman and a large proportion of white people believe he was guilty (See the very telling picture below as the OJ verdict was read on television)

I find this all very disturbing because I want to believe that I am an open minded person. Better yet, I actually want to be an open minded person. Yet I am unequivocably presented with the reality that I seek out information to confirm that which I already believe and filter out opposing information.

For the past couple of weeks, I have been reading a fascinating book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called “The Black Swan” subtitled “The Impact of the Highly Improbable” which illustrates the severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. It also helps to show how we concentrate on things we already know and fail to take into consideration what we don’t know, fooling ourselves into thinking that we know more than we actually do. One of many illustrations in the book which is relevant to this posting is a reference to a study of psychologists and their diagnostic abilities as it relates to increasing amounts of information. In the study, clinical psychologists were supplied with successive files, each containing an increasing amount of information about patients. It turns out that the psychologists’ diagnostic abilities did not grow with the supply of additional information, but rather they just got more confident in their original diagnosis.

So what is this game we are up to? It just seems that we so want to believe that we are right that we filter out information which does not support our beliefs. It’s something that’s been gnawing at me lately, making me really question what I believe and wonder what is really true.