Let's Talk About Confirmation Bias, Shall We?

“Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us?” 

Ooh, OUCH, Audre Lorde, that was EXACTLY what I was just doing. I can't HELP it that your grasp of the written word was so fine and so strong that you could cut through all the crap and get to the bloody, beating heart of the matter. As I struggle against confirmation bias, I need to learn to follow my own advice and actually dig down into the sources I read and the arguments posted against them, but given that I've got a pot of strawberry juice slowly turning to wine in my fridge if I don't make it into jelly soon, I'm gonna have to skip a step. 

So. Confirmation bias is one of the biggest issues political discourse faces today. And by "political discourse," I mean "political death cage matches on Facebook" and by "today," I mean "in the time of Covid 19" and by "one of the biggest issues," I mean "the thing that makes me want to throw my phone across the room and/or drive to your house and yell mean things at you from a social-distancing approved...um...distance."

What I mean is, "We're talking dumb to each other, y'all, and it's getting on my dang nerves."

Anybody who ever set foot in a high school debate practice knows what confirmation bias is. Basically, it means that a person will jump on and accept as the absolute truth any evidence (and I'm using that term reaaaallly loosely) that backs up her beliefs. Or, in the case of high school debaters, whatever whackadoo argument they're going to try to use to win debate rounds. For example, when I was a freshman in high school, the resolution (the thing debaters argue about) involved whether or not euthanasia should be legal. Given that it was roughly 9000 years ago, I forget the details and wording of the whole mess, but I vividly remember the day that the seniors ran their cases against each other and at one point, they talked about sending all the old people in the United States to Arizona or some other desert-y place, hitting them with a nuclear bomb, and then selling the resultant glass for a profit for the US government.

WHAT? I sat up from doodling the name of some dumb boy in my Trapper Keeper and looked over at my fellow freshman friends who were also wide-eyed with shock. THEY COULDN'T BE SERIOUS.

Bless your silly little heart, fourteen-year-old Not Hannah! Of course they weren't serious. But because they had found evidence that made even the most insane premise seem totally plausible, those seniors left a scar on your brain that still throbs today. Like the arthritis in my hips, only IN MY MIND. 

Anywho, that old-people-turning-into-glass-in-the-desert craziness has been throbbing in my brain lately because folks on social media are losing they dang minds on the regular and posting meaner and nastier and weirder things every day. And then all their friends that I've mercifully managed to avoid interacting with in real life join in the chorus of "Yeahs!" and "They're hiding the truth from us," and "We need to fight back against *insert whatever boogie man suits the poorly-sourced and -spelled meme to which we've all been treated.*

Ahh, how I long for the good old days of a few weeks ago, when we were joking about Coronacations and making masks and sharing our hoarded bottles of hand sanitizer. Now instead of making me weep in heartbroken gratitude, that Uber commercial about staying home makes me growl, "Like I want to be out among these idiots." 

BUT Y'ALL. That's kinda part of the problem, right? We're all so convinced that we've found the evidence that justifies our particular stance, we're not even thinking about what the idiots are saying. Or that we might be one of them. 

Let's take the Trump/injecting disinfectant brouhaha, for example. As a qualifier, I'll go ahead and say that I am not, nor have I ever been, a fan of Donald Trump. I've thought he was a gross, manipulative, pompous fartknocker since he came into my awareness when he married Marla Maples, who was from a little city near my tiny hometown and who is probably a relative given that we have Maples in our family on my mamaenthem's side. Plus, I'm a Democrat, and a Hillary Clinton voter, so...yeah. Not a fan.

For a week or so into the Covid-19 crisis, I sat through his press conferences about the virus and winced or groaned or yelled at my TV set depending on what reporter he insulted or lie he told. (I'm sorry...I'm trying to be fair here, but I'm just telling you my background. NOT A FAN.) After a batch of them, though, I had to just stop, for my own sanity, which means that I missed the infamous light and disinfectant comments he made. 

BUT OH, DID I CATCH UP QUICKLY.

Almost immediately, my liberal friends and folks I follow on Twitter went on the offense, declaring that Trump had told people to go out and inject disinfectant into their lungs. The next day, here came the conservatives, waving their "fake news" and "twisted media" flags. The back and forth! The name calling! The folks sitting on their Lime-a-rita fueled high horses talking about how BOTH sides needed to stop sharing their opinions with the world and show everybody their breakfast sandwiches instead. 

Ugh. We've come a long way since Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, yo. (They were slaveholding hypocrites, but at least they talked pretty to each other.)

Now for the truth about Disinfectantgate: BOTH SIDES WERE RIGHT AND WRONG.

1. Trump did say that he found it "interesting" to consider researching if light and disinfectant could be introduced into the body to fight Covid-19. He DID use the term "injection." 
2. Trump did NOT tell people to inject themselves with light or disinfectants or to use them in any way to fight Covid-19. He was talking to William Bryan, an undersecretary for the Department of Homeland Security, who had just given a presentation about ways to kill the virus on surfaces and to Dr. Deborah Birx, the Coronavirus Response Coordinator. Dr. Birx was not positive about the use of light as a treatment for the virus when asked directly by the president, and the White House actually released a transcript that at first showed that she was. A revised transcript was released that showed that she had said, of light used in the fight against Covid-19, "Not as a treatment."
3. Trump was NOT being sarcastic, nor was he talking to reporters as he is claiming now. There is no context for this in any of the video or transcripts of the event. 

And let's talk about the video evidence. It is CLEAR from the videos that Trump said what he said to William Bryan and Dr. Birx and that he was NOT giving advice to the American people. And yet, there are folks from both sides of the political spectrum using the videos and transcripts to bolster their arguments for or against the president. Why? Because they can.  (Also, the first transcript DID back the president's light treatment concept.) Editing and interpretation are fantastic tools to help people "tell the truth but tell it slant."

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

Oh, Emily Dickinson, you really were amazing, weren't you? That poem, man, it hits all the right spots when we're getting to why confirmation bias exists. The Truth is a scary dang thing. 

The Truth has teeth and it's not worried about our Sunday school habits or where we went to college or our political affiliation. It wants to EAT us (or at least scare us silly) and it doesn't care if we want to be its bedtime snack. So we build all these defenses against it.

It cannot BE that our government and medical and other societal systems are so ill-prepared for a pandemic that we break down when one arrives. So it must be the fault of the military industrial complex, or multimillionaire vaccine advocates, or evangelical Christians, or cellphone towers, OR it must be that the virus is not really that big of a deal and we should just somehow magically get herd immunity to it. 

It CANNOT be that the leader of the free world was spitballing solutions to a problem he can't fix (because he's not an expert on pandemics or medicine or sociology or education or any of the things that he'd have to be to fix it--these things are NOT HIS FAULT), so it must be that he was merely playing "gotcha" with the media OR that he's such an imbecile that he really thinks people should inject themselves with Lysol. 

Confirmation bias gives us evidence that the Truth is not as scary, that we can control it, that it has a logical explanation when it might really just be a monster. We might really be looking at the choice between the economy tanking at Depression-level eras or thousands more people dying. (Hint: that's what we're looking at. That's the Truth.) 

The problem with confirmation bias is that it prevents us from looking at all sides of an issue and arriving at a decent (if terrifying) grasp of reality. It allows us to look at those with opposing opinions as ill-informed, because they aren't looking at the evidence we are looking at, because THEY HAVE THEIR OWN EVIDENCE CONFIRMING THEIR BIASES. And what's the problem with that? Confirmation bias means that none of us are actually believing the truth.  Furthermore, confirmation bias creates a vicious cycle wherein media sources craft stories for specific audiences, hoping to push their own agendas and foment excitement in their readers, who in turn will support their advertisers, who in turn will continue to pay the media source for access to the readers. 

THIS IS NOT OKAY.

Is there a solution to confirmation bias? I mean, yeah, but y'all, it is HARD. First of all, you have to search out information sources that are non-biased, which is whoa crazy difficult. You can rely on charts like this one to help you with that. What you'll find below is not only a rating in terms of how the source skews to the right or left side of the political spectrum, but also the quality of the articles. So, for example, when looking for just basic news, the best place to go for network news is ABC. (The AP is your best bet overall.) If you want some analysis that skews right or left but doesn't have issues with reliability or extremism, you want to go with Forbes or The Atlantic, respectively. Both MSNBC and Fox News have reliability issues and the National Enquirer is, you know, useless. (If you need a bigger view of that thing, go ahead and go to this page, where you can view it to your little farsighted heart's content: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/?v=402f03a963ba. )

The second part is after you find a reliable NEWS source and then a reliable ANALYSIS source, you need to find a reliable source that lines up with views opposite yours. For me, I trust Reason. I don't always enjoy reading well-sourced articles that contradict my beliefs, but they do give me a different perspective without using words like "libtard" or "Dumbocrat." (Dumbocrat...good lord.) 

The third part (and most difficult for me) is to actually read sources that are given to you by others. Now, they might be in the extremist category above, or even just skew to the "wrong" direction, but reading the sources gives you insight into the mind of people who think differently than you. You might HATE reading them, but it's hard to tell somebody that they're wrong if...you know...you don't actually know that they're wrong. 

The fourth part is to make sure that you don't get affirmation drunk. You know exactly what I'm talking about, shmoopy! You post an article from some left-wing website that is not even LOOSELY "news" and you get a lot of "Trump is an idiot" or "Butter Emails!" posts and you feel the radiant glow of BEING CORRECT. Sigggggh.  Especially if you have tweens and teens in the house, HOLY MACKEREL, is that a great feeling. (The same goes if you post whackadoo stuff from a right wing site and everybody is all "Trump is the greatest president EVER." You know it.)

I don't think that it's possible for human beings to ever get rid of confirmation bias completely. We just like being right too much. We like being purveyors of information and we love to have others agree with us. It's built into our DNA for reasons I swear I can't fathom. Like...what possible evolutionary or spiritual reason could possibly exist for us being right all the time?  Anyway, we can't get rid of it. 

What we can do is acknowledge it, try to fight it, and try harder to see others' perspectives. Now, it's a beautiful day out, so I'm going to go grab my Lysol cocktail and sit out on the patio and practice the "hour of sunshine a day keeps the Covid away" mantra for a while. 

(I'm not that crazy or non-biased, y'all. Come ON.)