Confirmation Bias

What is Confirmation Bias? I attach the Wikipedia definition

(Anti-)Social Media

Like many people, I have social media accounts (or as I saw them more aptly named the other day Anti-Social media accounts). I have started to use Twitter more than Facebook. I find that Facebook seems to limit what I am shown, and decide that I would prefer a post from X rather than Y. Why? I would rather make that decision myself. It doesn’t even show me some posts, even though I know a friend has posted, so much so, that I now often search for the friend, and then look at their personal page to be sure I haven’t missed something.

And then there are the ads. I know many bloggers get paid for their ads, affiliate links etc. I use my iPad quite a lot, and it is very old and slow. I’m not mean, but why would I buy a new one while the old one still works? If there are a lot of ads on a page, it really slows everything down, so I lose the will to live and kill whatever I was reading. Facebook is free because they use our personal data, and our search information  to display appropriate ads for us, and sell to advertisers. Thanks but No Thanks. I am really not interested in a stool that lets me do headstands without hurting myself, but I have obviously clicked on something, that some algorithm somewhere, has now added to my preferred viewing list. Aaagh.

Twitter at least shows me the tweets from people I have followed, all of them, in time order, not ‘most popular’, regardless of how many times I click ‘most recent’. It also gives me lots of promoted items, but I find them less obnoxious / intrusive. My older son posts quite regularly on Twitter, and I enjoy many of the things he finds interesting / amusing. Example – he was at a parliamentary briefing the other day about changes to Hansard (it reports whats happens in Parliament in the UK). His final line was, ‘I also met a Parliamentary mouse scurrying along the back of a meeting room, oblivious to the people at the other end’… That made me smile! I know that there is a cat in 10 Downing Street, maybe they need a few more cats in the Houses of Parliament….

Source Pixabay

Vested Interests control what we, the public, see

At the moment, I am interested in reducing the amount of carbohydrate I eat, particularly sugar and processed foods. Apart from obesity, sugar and carbs are implicated in many health issues. Given that much of our health research is funded by the vested interests of Big Pharma and their friends – the Food Industry, the amount of mis-information promoted in the media is scary. This week in the UK, the BBC, and many of the newspapers were promoting the story that eat 3 eggs a week, and you’ll die of a heart attack. The basis for this article was 1 data sample in 17 years of follow up. Do you remember what your diet was 15 years ago? I sure don’t. However the food industry are keen that we don’t give up our carbs, so they like to make sure that articles that support their cause are well publicised, and shared around the media. They are less keen when the outcome of a report is contrary to their view. Take statins, many doctors across the world are now saying that statins are not essential for many of the age-groups they are prescribed for, and come with some bad side effects, but that is not a popular view if you are a pharmaceutical company selling statins. You want everyone to take them… Those people who are brave enough to stand up and question things, often find they are a target for organisations a lot bigger than they are.

The information we get is so filtered, that it is sometimes hard to work out the real truth. Think #FakeNews, a term that  didn’t exist five years ago. The term really came into high visibility with 2 political campaigns, the Brexit referendum in the UK in June 2016, and the US Presidential election in the US in November 2016. The online world was awash with theories about how our views had been manipulated by Facebook etc.

A discussion with my husband last Saturday, before he walked to the local garage to pick up a newspaper (Our Saturday morning treat!) We normally get The Times, but given all the discussion / parliamentary votes on Brexit this week, I was interested to get a wider perspective. So I said, how about getting a different paper as well? His answer went along the lines of – which newspaper owner’s view do you want? His favourite publication ‘The Private Eye’, a fortnightly satirical publication, has a long running discussion about the different articles that are published in any media outlet, depending on what the owners point of view is.

Three very different versions of the news….

The outcome, and it will only get worse…

By only seeing posts from those we ‘follow’, we narrow our own reading. We don’t follow someone whose posts we don’t like. We follow people whose views align with our own, or similar interests. I follow money bloggers, personal friends and some low-carb interests. So those are the views and stories that I see, not alternative views. I rarely scan ‘trending’news. So the stuff I read and look at, confirms my own view of the world.  I think I am ‘on message’. The problem is there are many thousands of different messages out there, where people think their view is the correct one, because their followers also support the same view. No-one likes to feel that they are on the wrong path.

Take the sad events in Christchurch on 15th March, where a young white male, with access to 5 guns, decided to attack 2 mosques, and kill at least 49 people, because their views didn’t align with his. His view that he was ‘right’ was confirmed by both his physical and his ‘online’ friends. So, effectively, if you are a terrorist, or a saint, you naturally seek out like minded people whose views support your own. Take your choice of theme, and off you go….. The life we lead encourages confirmation bias and polarisation.

• facebook – you only see the posts that your ‘friends’ post, plus advertisements based on your previous viewing / browsing history. Confirmation bias
• twitter – you only see the posts of people you follow, plus promoted posts, based on your previous viewing / browsing history – Confirmation bias
• instagram – you see the posts of people you follow, plus promoted posts, based on your previous viewing / browsing history – Confirmation bias
• newspapers – you read the information that the media owner and their staff, report. You choose the paper according to your views – Confirmation bias
• TV – you choose the channels you watch based on the views you hold – Confirmation bias
• online browsing, blogs etc. You read those blogs you like and whose views support your own. The FIRE movement is a great example of this. You can easily waste an hour or two, going from one post to another, all of them telling you how great FIRE is and lots of information backing it up. You aren’t interested in posts telling you what a waste of time it is, make the most of your life as it happens, not worry about the future, debt is great, credit cards rule. You aren’t interested in it, so you don’t look at it – Confirmation bias

And so it goes on. So what? I hear you say. What’s different? If there was only one channel, owned by the state, as there was in the UK for many years until the late 50’s, early 60’s, then the state defines what you see / read about / hear. Is it not better that at least you get to choose your own path?

How can we change?

I go back to the definition I started with “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses”. If we don’t like the story, we immediately say it is fake news. We become less tolerant of views that do not align with our own. We assume the other person is always wrong and we must be right, that’s what we see, those are the articles we read, those are the stories we see in our favourite newspaper.

For me there are a couple of things we might do

• change the newspaper we read on a regular basis
• seek out different points of view. For everything you firmly believe, every now and then look for information on the reverse. I don’t mean that as a pacifist you should suddenly start reading about terrorism. However, there is something about looking for the middle ground
• Be more gentle when others views do not agree with your own. The anonymity of platforms like Twitter encourage trolling and hate mail. Why is it suddenly OK to send thousands of horrific tweets to someone just because you disagree with their viewpoint. We have lost some of our social  restrictions. If you wouldn’t say it to your next door neighbour face to face, then you shouldn’t say it online. But some people consider it is OK, to send threatening tweets
• Take what is presented to us online with a pinch of salt. Just because it is in black and white (or colour) on our screens, does not make it true. It often isn’t

What do you think?

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