You might have heard of the terms Cognitive Bias, or Confirmation Bias. Confirmation Bias is the tendency to interpret what we experience in such a way as to *flavor* our own prior opinions about that subject. For example if someone has the opinion that black people commit a disproportionate number of crimes, and then they read in the local newspaper that someone, who just happens to be black, is accused of committing a crime, then that new information can work to confirm what they already believed. They will feel justified in their prejudice. And this is true even if later that accused individual is released or let go. In terms of confirmation bias, the damage is done.
Another example would be if someone believes the police are in the habit of using excessive force, and then they see a tweet about someone being beaten up by the police, that new information will work to confirm what they already believed, it can strengthen their existing opinion about police violence.
This also is demonstrated to work for ambiguous information. So suppose someone holds the bias about black people committing a disproportionate number of crimes, and they hear there was a crime, but there is no information about the assailant - then that person will often make the assumption "it must have been a black guy". I think everyone has seen this in action. Even if the information is ambiguous, it still gets interpreted to align with their existing opinion.
Now, you might ask, what is the difference between this and plain old fashion prejudice. And the difference is that inside the idea of confirmation bias, is the notion of an *iterative* process. So in other words, it is describing prejudice not as a thing or an *attribute* a person has, like saying "he's a racist," but rather we are saying that a person is engaged in a cycle. So there is an experience, and then the construction or adoption of an opinion, with or without some followup social interaction or discussion, and then followed by additional experience, which is then seen through the filter or rose coloured glasses of that opinion. And then rinse and repeat, basically ad infinitum. The cycle will continue.
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But it also makes sense that we would be continuously looking to confirm those assumptions because, for example we know where to put our foot down when we are walking along, but then if we encounter a cliff, walking any further would be disastrous. So, in the same way as with the physical body, on the mental level we can imagine people are continually in some process of confirmation. You can imagine a person driving a car. Such a person is continually checking and re-checking what direction they are going and what is ahead, and so on. So there is an equivalent mental process which keeps us on track. And sometimes we go off track and say something silly and we get called out on it.
Now, there has to be a driver for that mental effort, and its probably not just survival but also pleasure. So, one of the most basic observations we can make about a person who has just triggered their confirmation bias, is that there is a sense of pleasure that has been liberated. Having our opinions confirmed, is in itself a pleasurable experience. You know, the "I told you so."
I think it's likely that at a chemical level Confirmation is driven by Dopamine, that what we're describing is a dopamine loop. And, it's reasonable to assume that opinion generally works through a dopamine-driven process. So, if we are right about something, we want to keep being right. And the cost of bring wrong, means unpleasure. We feel foolish. We have to eat crow. We have to suck it up. Because we were wrong.
So, we can widen out this process of Confirmation Bias, and just talk about Confirmation as a mental process, or a general mental activity. We can easily conclude that bias is almost a continuous state for anyone. That Bias can be positive. So not all confirmation bias is negative. There are people who have a confirmation bias that the world is a good place, or that people are fundamentally good, like Socrates. Those people see and experience positive things others do and those perceptions confirm their positive bias. You encounter people like that in the Church or as ministers sometimes.
Now, let's talk about the Reversal. ...
Almost never would we witness a reversal. Reversals are the unusual situation where a person comes to accept they were wrong, perhaps in a fundamental sort of way - like the change in Scrooge towards the end of a Christmas Carol.
Reversals are really quite rare in the wild and much more common in fiction, because they are astonishing. You know, the last thing we expect from anyone is to change their point of view or to be convinced that they were wrong.
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