This post has taken me a bit longer to finish than I intended, but once I started writing I could not stop. This is such an important topic in society today, and it brought me back to teaching one of my favorite classes to undergraduates. So enjoy this post about confirmation bias, and how dangerous it is for our society as a whole.
I was recently thinking about the internet and how many people fall for click bait and fake information these days (It’s one of the reasons I started this blog. We need better resources for women out there than old wives tales and rumors). That’s not even including AI generated videos and photographs – I wonder often if anyone truly knows what is real anymore? [side note: had a conversation recently that our generation knows what is real/not on the internet, but soon, the young kids growing up with AI may not know which animals are real versus AI generated. I digress.]
These thoughts brought me to the concept of confirmation bias. Confirmation bias can be one of the very dangerous reasons that people fall for things like scams and phishing. It is the very human tendency to look only for information that agrees with our way of thinking. One could argue that this is how social media builds algorithms. The apps find things people “like” and continue to show more similar things to them. One of the main problems with confirmation bias is that when we only search for information that supports our pre-conceptions (or in science, our current hypothesis) of things and people, we tend to also refuse or refute real/important information that may challenge that belief.
Why is the refuting of information that challenges our beliefs dangerous? Because we are essentially eliminating diversity of thought. We are killing our ability to have conversations with people we have “othered” and it can lead to dehumanization. On the scientific front, we are ignoring important information that may bring us to our next hypothesis, gap in the research, or very important niche. Cures for diseases could be missed.
Okay, back to explaining confirmation bias a bit more in-depth: In the science and research realm, this means that when we are looking at research, we ignore studies that don’t support the hypothesis, narrative, or argument we are hoping to build (this could be in our review of literature, summary of the study, or discussion of our results at the end of our own experiment/study). This can thus build false narratives, and negatively impact the study of the topic/subject. It can also mean that the way in which we interpret data and results can be skewed to align with our beliefs (and why we must always, always, always work to be informed consumers). That saying, “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is,” almost always ring true in this situation.
This is also what makes secondary and tertiary sources dangerous to fully trust. You’re taking the word of someone else’s lens or slant on the result. Potentially their confirmation bias – it could have fit a narrative they were looking to share. In fact, any time I summarize a research article, I spend a lot of time comparing the methods and results to the conversation that happens in the discussion. Are the points the author is making at the end true and relevant? Is there sufficient evidence for them to purport the things that they are? And then when I am reading newspaper or magazine articles summarizing research, it is even more important to consider checking their sources and looking at the original research – especially if the article does not quite sound right or accurate to you.
I remember in undergrad, resveratrol was the “new, cool thing” in nutrition. Found in the skin of grapes (maybe, you should probably fact check that – but it’s definitely in grapes), it helped reduce evidence of aging! And therefore RED WINE WAS GOOD FOR YOU! Now, we know every time we consume alcohol, we increase our chance of developing cancer. Alcohol consumption is also not great for women. But RESVERATROL gave us an excuse to drink more red wine! Look, it’s healthy! Okay. But when you looked at the actual research studies, no wine was involved. It was the resveratrol from the grapes in a Petri dish. So an overgeneralization of its benefits resulted in a grossly overblown assumption about the research and the nutrient (can I call it that?). And likely impacted the health of quite a few people who wanted to hear that their wine habit was good for them.
Another way to look at this subject, is the idea of the mediteranean diet. Those who eat it look younger! So it must be great for your skin and body! But we didn’t consider lifestyle factors in the study, nor how the people who can afford to eat olive oil and fish, and stay out of the sun, probably don’t live the same daily stressors of everyone else. And we do know at this point that stress negatively impacts our telomeres, resulting in premature aging. There have also been arguments made that the sample size was too small, and the duration of the study too short to draw any real conclusions from the data. So again, be aware of the science of it – you can eat it all you want but it may not give you the skin you hoped for.
I used to teach a class on the field of exercise science, and I would ask my students to write three article reviews across the semester on a subject within the field that they found interesting. I used to have them complete a little project in class before we completed the first article review. We would break into four groups, and all four groups would read the same study and dataset/results. Each group was then given a different task for analyzing the dataset. Depending on the year, the study changed, and thus so did the tasks. But each group spent most of the class period developing an argument that fit their assigned task/narrative. It’s never easy to argue for something you don’t believe in, so that aside, it was always eye-opening for students to recognize that even when looking at the same data, different groups and people could draw very different conclusions.
That’s another thing – pay attention to who pays for the research. Private research may not be fully transparent in the results – they don’t have to follow the same ethics of an institutional review board, nor the rigor of the peer-review process. Pay attention to the control group, the dosage, and know what a normal dose might look like. When looking at medications, some studies will compare their drug to a generic, but not utilize a dosage that would ever have an impact on the test subject. Therefore, their drug always worked better. I know I am giving very generic examples here, but it’s so important to consider. We used to be able to blindly trust scientific research, but now anyone can start a blog (HA – at me) or create their own journal for publication. I used to share a published study on midi-chlorians with the same class. For those who don’t know, midi-chlorians are in the blood of anyone in the Star Wars world. Impossible for that study to be real, and yet a journal accepted it for publication — and in other words — was not a trustworthy fact-checking publication. Yes, the author did that intentionally with multiple “fake” online journals to show their lack of transparency and integrity.
That brings me to the concept of being an, “informed consumer”. You don’t want to be duped by sensationalism. And that is unfortunately rampant in the field of exercise science. It’s HUGE for influencers these days on social media – if it can make them money via clicks, they will try to sell it to you. And at the end of the day, fads are fads. They help companies keep you hooked and needing them. When at the end of the day, the best way to get results is often just showing up for yourself and being consistent. Stop comparing yourself to others on social media. I read an article recently about facetune and how so many young people were altering their appearance on social media that they no longer wanted to be out in public, because they did not look like their photos. What an awful space to be in mentally – afraid of real life because of the idealized and fake image you created of yourself. This is a small tangent – but the real world is out there! Get off your screen – social media is not reality. Your phone can’t fix things. Wanting what others have won’t get them for you. You have to go work for it – work for results and outcomes. Jealousy won’t get you far. It feels like yesterday that we were all in lockdown and unable to interact with one another in-person. And here we are, spending more time on our screens than out in the real world having experiences with the people we love.
Okay, back to the topic – confirmation bias. I think it’s more important than ever that we pay attention to the ulterior motives of the companies and groups trying to push information at us. Building a case that only speaks half truths is not the way of a just or trustworthy society, group, or establishment. Creating a narrative that makes you feel good in the moment doesn’t get you to the truth. And eventually, you will have to face the truth that you were avoiding, in whatever realm of life. And if we’re speaking freely about social media, consider how divided our society has become in recent years. It’s the algorithm again – and our unwillingness to have conversations with people we don’t agree with. We decide, at some point, that we do not like them, that we will never agree with them, and our confirmation bias eventually creates an echo chamber of our belief(s).
Imagine a world where instead of “innocent until proven guilty”, we lived in the confirmation biases of the jury. You are on trial for a crime, and the jury chooses to ignore facts in the case because they simply believe you are guilty. How would you feel? I would argue not great.
Building echo chambers truly benefits no one. We all sit in our spaces thinking we are right, and never hearing or learning from others. It’s okay to change, learn, and grow. It’s okay to be wrong. It’s okay to think you know something or someone and be pleasantly surprised. But if we continue to sit in our spaces and bolster our beliefs without bothering to learn how true or accurate they are, we have no space to engage in thoughtful and meaningful conversations that help us learn about the points of view of others, and the beautiful world around us.
“Man this echo chamber’s getting loud.” -Bastille (Doom Days)
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