"We have a very bad habit of looking for information that agrees with us. This thirst for agreement rather than refutation is known as confirmatory bias. When Karl Popper wrote his philosophy of science, he stated that the only way of testing a view is to form the hypothesis and then spend the rest of the day looking for all the information that disagrees with it. But that isn’t the way most of us work. We tend to form our views and then spend the rest of the day looking for all the information that make us look right.
Our natural tendency is to listen to people who agree with us. It feels good to hear our own opinions reflected back to us. We get those warm, fuzzy feelings of content. Sadly, this isn’t the best way of making optimal decisions. What we should do is sit down with the people who disagree with us most. Not to enable us to change our minds (because the odds are staked massively against such an outcome), but rather to make us aware of the opposite point of view. We should look for the logical error in the opposite point of view. If we can’t find such an error, then we shouldn’t be so sure about holding our own view as strongly as we probably do.
A supplementary problem for trying to follow this path is that we often find ourselves suffering the hostile media bias. That is, not only do we look for information that agrees with us, but when we are presented with information that disagrees with us we tend to view the source as having a biased view!"
No comments:
Post a Comment