Examples Of Confirmation Bias In Riveted By Jim Davies

We as humans tend to have the belief that our opinions are based on conclusions that resulted from completely rational, objective reasoning. We think that we have considered all evidence equally before arriving at a conclusion, and if we were to be presented with enough evidence opposing it, we would be quick to correct ourselves. However, people have again and again proved that this is not how we form our opinions. In reality, we have the tendency to ignore information that challenges our established beliefs, choosing to pay a disproportionate amount of our attention to information that confirms our beliefs. This phenomenon is known as confirmation bias. Its implications were introduced in class by Dr. Jim Davies and expanded upon in his book, “Riveted”, which I will use to explain how the confirmation bias can cause problems in our society, such as racism and even the spread of disease, and how awareness of it can guide us to finding truth. In his lecture on cognitive biases, Davies placed special emphasis on this bias. He stated that it is important for people to be aware of it and that by being aware of this phenomenon, we could avoid making many errors. In his book, Davies discusses what kinds of errors confirmation bias can lead us to make and how dangerous they can be for our society. In his lecture, Davies spoke about how confirmation bias perpetuates social problems such as racism and sexism. As an example, he stated that a person can have a belief that women are bad drivers. This person could observe women driving both well and poorly but because of confirmation bias, they would only pay attention to the latter, and not pay attention to the former. As a result, they would only remember the cases of bad driving of females they have witnessed, and be quick to forget both good female drivers and bad male drivers. This would only make their false belief stronger. There have been studies that demonstrated that women are on average more careful drivers, but a person who has a belief that contradicts this would most likely ignore these studies or claim them to be invalid. This is further demonstrated in an example Davies gives in “Riveted” of a study in which participants read science papers that either confirmed or disconfirmed their existing beliefs (p.63). Those who read the paper …show more content…
Congruence bias is the tendency to avoid all other possible conclusions after a first conclusion is made. In other words, when a person feels like they have “found the answer”, they are unlikely to consider other possible answers. Davies suggests that confirmation bias and congruence bias originate from the same psychological mechanism. In both cases, it is a tendency to avoid information that challenges previously accepted views. Both of these behaviours can lead to errors with serious implications. In “Riveted”, Davies gives the example of a study done by Deanna Kuhn on how juries reach a verdict. The participants were given evidence and asked to determine guilt or innocence. The result was that most participants quickly came to a conclusion on what they thought happened and proceeded to search for evidence that supported their idea, rather than first look at the evidence and then reach a conclusion. This example demonstrates how this psychological mechanism of bias when looking at information can lead to irrational decisions and