Researching until you agree with yourself

Four cards on a table. Each has a letter on one side and a number on the other. You can see E, K, 4 and 7.

The rule to test: if a card has a vowel on one side, it has an even number on the other.

Which cards must you turn over? Decide before reading on.

Predict

Which pair of cards, turned over, could actually falsify the rule?

Choose one answer

E and 4E and 7E onlyAll four, to be thorough

Lock in answer

Why thoroughness makes it worse

This is the part that makes the bias dangerous rather than merely common.

Someone who spends ten minutes forming a view holds it loosely. Someone who spends forty hours holds it firmly, and is right to — forty hours ought to count for something. But if all forty hours were spent gathering supporting material, the confidence went up and the evidence did not, in exactly the way a crowd's confidence goes up without its evidence growing.

So the effort is real, the feeling of rigour is real, and the belief ends up more certain and no better tested. The people most vulnerable to this are therefore not the lazy ones. They are the ones who do the reading.

The three moves

The bias operates through three distinct steps, and they can be interrupted separately.

Search. The question you type decides most of the answer. "Is this a good investment" and "why do people lose money on this" return different internets.

Interpretation. Ambiguous evidence gets read as supporting whichever side you were already on. Both sides of a genuine disagreement can read the same report and each come away more confident.

Recall. Later, the supporting items come to mind easily and the awkward ones do not, so even a balanced sample becomes lopsided in memory.

Check

Someone wants to check a business idea. Which action is a genuine test rather than a search for support?

Choose one answer

Describing the idea to twenty people and counting how many like itReading about companies in the same space that succeededFinding people who tried something similar and stopped, and asking what happenedBuilding a detailed financial model of the first three years

Check answer

What actually interrupts it

Telling yourself to be open-minded does approximately nothing, for the same reason telling yourself to be well-calibrated does approximately nothing. What works is changing the question, because the question is the part that selects the sample.

Ask what would change your mind, and write it down before looking. If nothing would, you are not holding a belief about the world, you are holding a preference, and it should be labelled as one.

Look for the strongest version of the other side, not the weakest. The weakest version is always available and its only function is to make you feel finished.

Find someone whose job or money depends on the opposite view. They have already done the work of assembling the contrary case, and they had an incentive to do it properly.

Two readings

Research most people do

Gathering material about a position until enough has accumulated to feel settled.

Measured in

Hours spent, sources read, notes taken

For example

Reading twelve articles about a thing you are already inclined to do.

Rests on

That more information reliably produces a better-calibrated belief.

Chase it alone and

Confidence rises with effort while the evidence base stays one-sided, and the effort itself becomes the justification.

Research that can fail

Naming in advance what evidence would overturn the position, then going to look for it specifically.

Measured in

Whether the falsifying evidence was searched for and what was found

For example

Writing down the two findings that would kill the idea, then spending the afternoon hunting for them.

Rests on

That a belief you have tried and failed to break is worth more than a belief you have decorated.

Chase it alone and

It is slower, it is unpleasant, and it can leave you genuinely undecided, which is a worse feeling than being confidently wrong.

Both sides accept
Both accept that effort matters and that more information is generally better than less. The disagreement is about whether the direction of the search is part of the method or a detail.

Which is which? Put each one on a side.

• Opening the reviews and sorting by lowest rating first

  Research most people doResearch that can fail

• Asking a friend who agrees with you whether it sounds sensible

  Research most people doResearch that can fail

• Writing down, before you start, the number that would make you walk away

  Research most people doResearch that can fail

A warning about the fix

There is a failure mode on the other side, and it is worth naming because this course could easily produce it.

Someone who has learned about confirmation bias can use it as a weapon: any argument they dislike gets dismissed as motivated reasoning, and any evidence that agrees with them is exempt because they thought about it carefully. The bias becomes something other people have.

The only defence is that the test is procedural, not psychological. It does not ask whether someone is being fair-minded, which is unknowable. It asks what evidence was searched for, whether the falsifier was named before the answer was known, and whether anything was ever found that moved the position. Those are questions you can answer about your own last three decisions, and the answers are usually informative.

Worth remembering

• Confirmation bias mostly operates through which evidence you go looking for, not through refusing evidence you find.
• Only observations that could contradict a rule can test it; observations compatible with it produce no information.
• Thorough one-sided research raises confidence without improving the evidence base, so careful people are highly exposed.
• The bias runs through search, interpretation and recall, and each of those can be interrupted separately.
• Naming in advance what would change your mind is the one correction that reliably does something.