Perception: Confirmation Bias

Confirmation Bias is a very powerful cognitive pattern also known as “myside” bias. It is the tendency to interpret information that supports an already held belief, hypothesis, or thought you may have. In a time of great political division in our country, confirmation bias is a bit of a hot topic. So why would I be addressing confirmation bias in a therapy blog? Because this bias shows up all the time in relationships and can create a lot of trouble!

Here is an example of how confirmation bias can play out in a partnership. A wife comes home from work to find dishes in the sink. Her husband has been home from work for hours. The discussion about shared household responsibilities has been an issue in the marriage before. She sees the dishes and immediately goes to anger. “He never helps with the household chores.” She perceives the dishes in the sink as proof of her long term frustration and even allows it to change her mood so when her husband comes downstairs to greet her, she is cold and sullen.

Now, perhaps she is correct and he saw the dishes when he got home and choose to ignore them. It is also possible that he didn’t go into the kitchen, nor did he see the dishes. Another possibility is that he came home, did a load of laundry, and was just coming downstairs after having put the clean clothes away. The point is, there was an interpretation of information that confirmed her belief and she did not question what was real.

The difficulty with confirmation bias is that it can create a neural pathway in your brain that almost blinds you to opposing information. Neuropsychologists find that once a neural pathway is created, it is often easier for the neurons to continue to fire down that path rather than seek out a new path. Confirmation bias is also alarming because it can influence the way you remember experiences and events, meaning you will pull information from your memory that only supports your belief.

So how do you combat confirmation bias?Mindfulness and curiosity.

Mindfulness is a mental state in which you are aware of the present moment. It is a mindset acknowledging what is happening only in the current moment. Mindfulness does not confer with the past nor does it fret about the future; it rests in the now. What are you doing now? What is happening in this present moment? What do you know in this present moment? In the above example, asking these three questions may have elicited the acknowledgement that confirmation bias was taking over and changing the wife's mood.

To inspire curiosity, I want to reference an element of Buddhist teachings. At the heart of Buddhist practice is something called the Noble Eightfold Path. One element of this path is the idea of “Right Thinking,” which encourages you to ask questions about your thinking. Is your thinking helpful or useful?

Another important question “Right Thinking” offers is “are you sure?” This is such a valuable question to ask when you are considering your thinking. One example used to illustrate this idea is that of the snake or the rope dilemma. You are walking down a path and you see something up ahead. It is a piece of rope, but you perceive it as a snake. The perception of the snake invokes fear based behaviors, whereas curiosity would have allowed you to continue on your walk, albeit in a cautious manner, but you would still be moving forward.

A huge step in countering confirmation bias is to understand the elements of this theory. Once you can identify the bias in your thought patterns, try some mindfulness techniques to pull you back to the present moment. Then allow curiosity to lead you rather than assumption.