While we think of ourselves as being the rational animal, we humans falll victim to all sorts of biases. From the Dunning-Kruger Effect to Confirmation Bias, there are countless psychological traps waiting for us along the path to true rationality. And what's more, when attributing bias to others, how can we be sure we are not falling victim to it ourselves? Joshua Mugg and Muhammad Ali Khalidi ask, might we be biased about bias itself?
How rational are we? And if we are not rational, how could we tell, since we would have to rely on our reasoning to make that determination? Over the last few decades, psychologists have uncovered numerous ways that humans fail to live up to our own ideal of rationality. We are overconfident of our performance (‘Dunning-Kruger Effect’), we seek out information to confirm what we already believe instead of thinking about what would challenge our beliefs (‘Confirmation Bias’), the theories we hold seem to influence what we observe (‘Theory-Laddeness of Observation’), and we think we are less biased than others (‘Bias Blind Spot’).
Worse still, many of these cognitive biases are supposed to influence scientists and experts. Charles Darwin recounts that he hadn’t noticed the glacial effects on the landscape on his first trip to Wales, even though the evidence was staring him in the face. Why? Because he had not been taught glacial theory—his theory (or lack thereof) biased his observation. Today doctors interpreting medical test results often fail to consider how common the disease is, a phenomenon known as the ‘Base-Rate Neglect Fallacy.’ These and many other systematic reasoning errors have been widely shown to affect the practice of scientific practitioners when it concerns the types of reasoning that are employed in the course of their scientific research.
___
having a tendency towards confirmation as opposed to disconfirmation can be healthy in many contexts
___
Join the conversation