Confirmation Bias

You know those people who always seem to find evidence that the world is against them? The ones who can turn a perfectly decent day into a catalogue of disasters? The ones who, no matter what happens, somehow manage to prove to themselves that yes, life really is as terrible as they thought it was? You might be one of them. In fact, if you’re reading this course, there’s more than a decent chance you are one of them.

I’ve talked before about how your mind likes to solve problems. It’s one of the brilliant things about human brains. They’re constantly working in the background, looking for solutions, making connections, figuring things out. When you train your mind to be solution-focused, it’ll work on your problems even when you’re not consciously thinking about them. You’ll wake up with ideas. You’ll spot opportunities. You’ll see options you missed before.

But here’s the problem. If you don’t train your mind to be solution-focused, it does the exact opposite. It becomes problem-focused instead. And when your mind is looking for problems, guess what it finds? Problems. Everywhere. All the time. It’s like buying a blue car and suddenly noticing blue cars everywhere you go. They were always there, you just weren’t looking for them.

We talked about the danger of this before. How an untrained mind that isn’t solution-focused can actually make things worse. You feel bad, so your brain tries to figure out why by searching for everything else that’s wrong in your life. It’s trying to help, in its own twisted way. It’s trying to make sense of your feelings by finding evidence to support them. The trouble is, there’s a cognitive bias that makes this problem so much worse. It’s called confirmation bias, and I see it every single day in people who are completely stuck in their problems.

Confirmation bias happens when you get into the mental habit of looking for things around you to confirm your preconceptions and how you view the world. When you’ve got this bias running unchecked, you become blinkered. You only see the things that confirm how bad your situation is. Everything else, all the evidence that contradicts your view, that shows opportunities or possibilities or things going right, your brain just filters it out. Doesn’t even register.

We all know these people. The glass-half-empty crowd. The pessimists, the naysayers, the killjoys who can suck the energy out of a room faster than you can open a window. They’re always telling you why something can’t be done, how bad things are, what’s going wrong or what could go wrong. They’re totally focused on problems, on obstacles, on everything that’s difficult or dangerous or doomed to fail.

Maybe you’re one of them. Or maybe not. All I want you to do right now is take a step back and acknowledge that these people exist. You’ve met them. You work with them. Maybe you’re related to them. Maybe you see one in the mirror every morning.

Here’s the truly ironic part. People use confirmation bias to make themselves feel more secure. They cling to their beliefs even when those beliefs are holding them back, keeping them stuck, making them miserable. Their mind is programmed to find problems, so they naturally make up arguments to keep themselves exactly where they are in life. They look for evidence to confirm why they can’t move forward. They refuse to see opportunity even when it’s staring them straight in the face, waving its arms and shouting “Look at me!”

Why do they do this? Because new opportunity and change create uncertainty and doubt. There’s another thinking tendency called doubt avoidance tendency (we’ll get to that later), and it works hand in hand with confirmation bias to keep you stuck. You mentally do what you think is right to avoid doubt. You seek protection in doing what you’ve always done. You drift into a mindset where you fail to consider counter-arguments. You only listen to what you want to hear. You favour any information that strengthens your old beliefs, no matter how flimsy that information might be.

It might sound difficult to believe, but people really do look around themselves to confirm why they have a problem, why they haven’t achieved anything, why they won’t achieve anything. They gather evidence in their lives to make themselves feel more secure in their views. In my surgery as a GP, I sometimes see people stuck like this who come to me looking for medical proof to confirm their views too. They want tests. They want a diagnosis. They want a medical reason why they can’t move on. Something official. Something they can point to and say, “See? I told you I couldn’t do it.”

For people stuck like this, their world is a genuinely negative place. A place that confirms their view everywhere they look. If your mind isn’t trained to look for solutions, it’ll look for more problems rather than figuring out how to solve any of them. It’s a vicious cycle. You feel bad, so you look for reasons why you feel bad, which makes you notice more bad things, which makes you feel worse, which makes you look for even more reasons.

If this type of thinking is affecting you, then my advice is to try and start being more objective, especially when you feel your mind wandering, looking for problems, or catastrophising about what’s good. The first thing you need to do to break any habit is awareness. Notice that you’re doing it. Notice especially when it’s creating negative thoughts and feelings in your life.

Create some doubt in your mind. Think about how others might view the world. Maybe they see things differently. Maybe they’re not wrong and you’re not right. Accept that being wrong isn’t the end of the world. Perhaps all you’re doing is trying to protect yourself without even realising it. Perhaps you’ve built your entire life around being right about how terrible things are.

Confirmation bias is one of the strongest biases there is. It’s hard to break entrenched habits and false beliefs, especially when your whole life could be built around them. When your identity is wrapped up in being the person who struggles, who can’t catch a break, who always knew it wouldn’t work out, letting go of that is terrifying. Who would you be if you weren’t that person anymore?

The next steps are to start listening to the views of others. Start accepting change in your life and new challenges. You need to be willing to be wrong. You need to be willing to fail. You need to be willing to experience life rather than spending all your time focused on being right, especially when that rightness is based on misconceptions and distortions.

Don’t be the person who spends their life feeling smug about the failure of themselves or others. You know the type. They predicted it wouldn’t work, and when it doesn’t, they get this little spark of satisfaction. “I told you so.” As if being right about something failing is more important than actually trying to make things work. What a miserable way to live.

Perhaps the answer to confirmation bias is just to be more rational. A world where you’re always looking for what’s wrong is not a nice place to be. But equally, a world where you’re looking through rose-tinted glasses all the time is probably a step too far in the other direction. All I’m asking you to do is look at information in a more neutral way. Be objective. Question your assumptions. Notice when you’re cherry-picking evidence.

When you start doing this, you’ll gradually begin to open your eyes to opportunity. You’ll start focusing on challenges as things to solve rather than reasons to give up. You’ll start seeing solutions instead of just more problems. Your brain will still work in the background, but instead of confirming how stuck you are, it’ll start finding ways forward.

This isn’t easy. Your brain has been running these patterns for years, maybe decades. It’s comfortable in its confirmation bias. It knows exactly where to look to prove itself right. Changing this takes effort, awareness, and persistence. But it’s possible. And it’s necessary if you want to move forward.

Start small. Next time you catch yourself thinking “See? I knew this would go wrong,” stop and ask yourself what evidence you might be ignoring. What went right? What opportunities did you miss because you were too busy looking for problems? What alternative explanations might there be?

How you perceive your world shapes how you experience it. Change your perception, and you change a great deal about how your world feels. Not easy, but that’s roughly the shape of it. And that’s where we’re headed next.

Ready?

Further reading

• Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175-220.
• Wason, P. C. (1960). On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12(3), 129-140.
• Lord, C. G., Ross, L., & Lepper, M. R. (1979). Biased assimilation and attitude polarization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(11), 2098-2109.
• Klayman, J., & Ha, Y. W. (1987). Confirmation, disconfirmation, and information in hypothesis testing. Psychological Review, 94(2), 211-228.
• Mercier, H., & Sperber, D. (2017). The Enigma of Reason. Harvard University Press.