How Did Confirmation Bias Evolve?

If you build a learning machine then unlearning can only be done by learning.
 
robinson said:
"It's been found that ignoring evidence against a belief one firmly holds stimulates the same pleasure centers as addictive drugs"

I keep wondering why such an outrageous claim as this hasn't been challenged. It is such a earth shattering scientific discovery, on so many levels. But is there a shred of truth in it?

I mean, isn't it obvious that such an amazing phenomenom has immense value? I simply ignore some evidence that challenges a strong belief, and I am high as a kite! Pleasure center stimulation baby! Whoo Hoo! Fantastic.

In fact, because I don't believe that claim for a second, I must be experiencing intense pleasure right now! How cool is that?
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I believe the request for a citation has been ignored.
 
Jeff Corey said:
Those are examples of stimulus generalization. I think a better example might be Skinner's "Superstition" in the Pigeon, and that's a stretch.

The striking aspects of Wason's demonstration of confirmation bias are that it is so strong, hard to unlearn and occurs in cases where there is no emotional commitment to the statement being tested.
About 90% of people tested on the 4 card problem get it wrong. Many students still get it wrong after it has been explained repeatedly and some skeptics argue about the correct answer. And who could have any emotional baggage attached to "All cards with a vowel on one side have an even number on the other"?
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Perhaps it is the testing population being in college and all?

;)

I think a better example is the guy who says to every women he meets "Has anyone ever told you how beautiful you are?" , due to intermittant reinforcement they continue without success.
 
Mr. Scott said:
Westen, Drew; Kilts, C., Blagov, P., Harenski, K., and Hamann, S. (2006). "The neural basis of motivated reasoning: An fMRI study of emotional constraints on political judgment during the U.S. Presidential election of 2004.". Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Shermer, Michael (July 2006). The Political Brain. Scientific American.

Emory University Health Sciences Center (2006-01-31). Emory Study Lights Up The Political Brain. Science Daily.
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Thank you.
 
Posted by Mr. Scott

Quote:
partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones
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Is that a citation from Westen or someone else? I have to go to the library to read the actual article. Who said that?
 
Shouldn't the question be: Why has the tendency for confirmation bias not been eliminated by evolution?

Sorry if someone has already ask this, but I didn't want to look at the whole thread, so I only read a few posts that indicated that no one had;)
 
robinson; said:
Humor doesn't translate well to this medium, because you can't hear it being said in the Comic book Guys voice.
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Really? Someone should notify The Onion.
 
kellyb said:
Well, even with the bushman tongue clicking, what's interesting is that (this is a popular theory in child development at the moment...not sure if it'll still be thought of as "the truth" in 20 years or whatever) in the pre-verbal stage of development, babies/toddlers actually go through and practice all the sounds used in cultures all over the world, and they only retain the ones specific to their culture. So in a way, you could say the tongue clicking is probably genetic to some extent. It just usually gets trumped by some drive to stop making sounds no one around you makes.
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I'm aware of "natural syntax" (a la Chomsky) - you're just repeating what I said.

To continue the analogy - maybe we naturally use many mechanisms to test our environment, but our cultures whittle it down to a few strategies, such that confirmation bias ends up being dominant.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
Language: genetic. Ability to speak a particular language: learned.


I still say the tendency to commit confirmation bias might just be a by product of something else, and I'd worry about whether it's a trait that is selected for before asking the how or why.

Would you say pareidolia is a trait that evolved? (See my previous post.) Is there a reproductive advantage or disadvantage to seeing the Virgin in a tortilla?
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Exactly. In this case, pareidolia is certainly a negative artefact of the otherwise highly-beneficial complex predisposed ability for pattern recognition. It's probably very primitive, and we have hints of examples outside the homo genus, such as the ability of animals to generalize connections with past trauma.

For example, my friend's dog was kicked by a man in black pants when he was a puppy, and now fears black pants. My other friend's dog was shot at by guns, so also fears balloons (because they pop, which sounds like a gun). We have decades of experiments with birds pecking at obscure objects (such as cricket bats or tennis shoes) that are merely similarly colour-patterned to their mother's beak. Last summer, I saw some plants drop their leaves after a cold snap in July, because they erroneously misrecognized it as part of the pattern to flag the start of autumn.
 
I have a really good theory on this. Still working out the bugs in it, but I am counting on you, yes you, to help me avoid confirmation bias in the investigation of this matter.
 
Just a thought here, but might not confirmation bias be directly linked to pattern-seeking?

I don't think any of us would argue that we're "hard-wired" to look for and find patterns (which leads to things like the aforementioned pareidolia). I think this may, to an extent anyway, be the same general type of thing at work in confirmation bias.

We develop an idea or hypothesis by observing a pattern. Since we're wired to find patterns, the patterns that match our idea are more easily noticed and found than things that don't match the pattern. IN other words, once we've identified a pattern, we look for other similar patterns rather than not-patterns. I don't think I'm explaining this clearly, but can't figure out exactly how to word it. Let me try again :)

We are wired to find patterns, and a mechanism to provide pleasure upon identifying patterns would seem beneficial. Once we've identified a particular pattern, it's easier to find that pattern again than to discern a new pattern, or re-arrange things. So, this might help explain confirmation bias...it;s easier for us to look for and identify a pattern we've already developed, thus getting the reward, than to find a new one. And all of this relates into our basic drive to find patterns.

Sound feasible?
 
Sound feasible?
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Yes. Like I said unlearning is harder. The more concepts linked to some learnt, incorrect, correlation the harder it is to unlearn. Quite possibly also because unlearning requires a significant amount of new routing rather than the simple removal of some, i.e. to unlearn you must learn - you cannot simply unlearn.
 
Dancing David said:
Is that a citation from Westen or someone else? I have to go to the library to read the actual article. Who said that?
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That was a quotation of Dr. Weston himself. The key phrase for me is "massively reinforced" behavior of exercizing one's bias.
 
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Citation for Confirmation Bias Addiction

Dancing David said:
I believe the request for a citation has been ignored.
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I didn't ignore the request, just had too little time for JREF until now. I relocated the smoking gun that links confirmation bias with drug addiction-like psychology. Here's a quote and links:

Once partisans had come to completely biased conclusions -- essentially finding ways to ignore information that could not be rationally discounted -- not only did circuits that mediate negative emotions like sadness and disgust turn off, but subjects got a blast of activation in circuits involved in reward -- similar to what addicts receive when they get their fix, Westen explains.
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2007 Confirmation Bias (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

Emory Study Lights Up The Political Brain

robinson said:
I keep wondering why such an outrageous claim as this hasn't been challenged. It is such a earth shattering scientific discovery, on so many levels. But is there a shred of truth in it?

I mean, isn't it obvious that such an amazing phenomenom has immense value? I simply ignore some evidence that challenges a strong belief, and I am high as a kite! Pleasure center stimulation baby! Whoo Hoo! Fantastic.

In fact, because I don't believe that claim for a second, I must be experiencing intense pleasure right now! How cool is that?
Click to expand...
 
Mr. Scott said:
I'm not really focusing on superstition.

My main curiosity is in the connection between ignoring evidence that contradicts your beliefs and stimulating the pleasure center. I'm ready to believe that a single genetic mutation resulted in a connection between these two groups of neurons, and that this bit of accidental neuron wiring was then selected for.

In pseudocode one would write this as follows:

FUNCTION Confirmation Bias(input,model)
IF(input doesn't agree with model)
THEN
discard input
stimulate pleasure center()
END

FUNCTION Stimulate Pleasure Center()
whatever you just did, do it again ASAP and with more gusto
END FUNCTION
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That's not how it works. The stimulation comes from the "Yes, my ******* insane theory is right" effect. Because a human's perception is, by itself, "intelligent" (not just cameras and microphones like a computer), a sufficiently trained perceptive system can interpret any sort of input as confirming some ******* insane theory.

Being "Right" (confirmation) of course stimulates the pleasure center, just as does learning something completely new, or kicking some scumbag's ass, or jacking off.

Some people just (subconsciously) train their perceptive system to confirm a particular idea over and over, and this effect is - to a limited degree - self-reinforcing due to the pleasure center stimulus.

There's no gene for confirmation bias. If you've got trainable perceptive organs and a pleasure center (like *every* animal is going to have) then you've got all you need for experiencing confirmatory bias. Of course, there may be genetical factors (for example, a greater curiosity drive, or a less responsive pleasure system) that enhance or diminish confirmation bias, but more important is probably education, that educates about the trainable perceptive system, and that it is unwise to completely trust one's own perceptions.

Also, confirmatory bias is probably even a selective advantage. If we wouldn't constantly seek to confirm (rather than the intellectually much wiser falsification) our beliefs and assumptions, we probably wouldn't be able to make a single decision, since we were so completely unsure about everything.
 
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