Confirmation Bias in 5 Minutes

[Music] [Applause] our minds are divided between an elephant and a writer and while we often think of the writer as the one in control of the elephant we often forget that the writer is only the guide we usually call our writer consciousness and our elephant unconsciousness and it's the divide between them that makes us think we are right when we are actually wrong and guess what it doesn't matter how smart you are or if you're liberal or conservative you are first in foremost human this means that you are also bias toward yourself your beliefs and

your values bias is simply when we think in a way that leads us to be wrong it's unavoidable and hard to recognize there are literally hundreds if not thousands of different types of bias but one of the most familiar to us is called confirmation bias this is when for example you see some politician on TV denying that the climate is changing and only legitimizes the facts that support her or his point of view but why does this happen and why is it in our nature to see the evidence on only our side of the table

our brains have to understand a shitload of data but it can't so instead it takes shortcuts so that we can focus on what we think are the most important bits these shortcuts are stored deeply in our unconscious mind and is the reason we create stereotypes for example when we grow up we mostly see men as leaders in women as caretakers think about it can you name one female US president how about one actor that is typecast as a stay-at-home dad because of these life experiences our brains create patterns and store them in our elephants or

our unconsciousness these patterns then turn into generalized thoughts and expectations about most things in this case of men and women it turns out that in many cases these generalized thoughts are wrong women can make pretty great leaders and men can be amazing stay-at-home dads but even if the writer understands this it's still hard to control what our elephant believes this explains a lot about why our brains have these patterns and why they create stereotypes but what about why we try to prove people wrong even when we are wrong a theory and evolutionary psychology says we

evolved our ability to reason as a way to further our social agendas justify our actions and defend the groups we belong to why groups that work well together often beat groups that are made up of selfish individuals in a way we are all self-righteous hypocrites our elephants want us to survive so that our group dominates part of this means we often find evidence that supports a belief that we already have rather than looking for the evidence that opposes our already held belief and everybody is prone to this kind of confirmation bias this video included one

recent example of confirmation biases president Trump's nominee to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality Cathleen Hartnett white miss white doesn't believe that human activity is a major driver of climate change and claims that carbon dioxide emissions is good for the environment on one side you have millions of people that will immediately call this bit crazy but if you ask those disagrees why many of them won't be able to share the evidence to disprove her instead they will go with their gut aka their elephant which can also be right by the way at the

same time if you were to ask that crazy business white why she believes co2 is good for the environment satellites already show a greening of the earth in part from the very small amount of carbon dioxide involved with using fossil fuels she'd probably give you a list of her reasons but wouldn't address the evidence on the other side of the table she probably would also leave out the fact that she is a lobbyist for the Texas Public Policy Foundation an organization founded by art conservative Christian billionaire James lenninger this is an organization that has a

mission to deregulate markets and has been funded by ExxonMobil Chevron and other companies dubbed the who's who of text polluters she might also leave out the fact that she's a bad person and doesn't really care about how her actions affect others for example if she voted to build coal plants near Dallas even when the mayors and officials of those areas strongly opposed it let's just say that miss White's elephant is backed up but because of her bias she as the writer probably doesn't even know that improbably thinks she's doing the right thing and this is

why she you and I are all often wrong we forget that we can be wrong and it's especially hard for people that have been stereotyped is smart their whole lives to admit that their elephant is in more control of them than they as the writer and as an expert it might be even harder to say I was wrong and harder still to say I don't know this white is an expert in so are thousands of other scientists and policymakers but as an expert politician teacher human or whatever it's our responsibility to make decisions and judgments

that are as bias free as possible and admit when we are wrong or simply don't know the answer unfortunately those in leadership are often the ones that are least likely to do that thank you for watching and please subscribe like and share this video it all