Streamline Training & Documentation: Avoiding Confirmation Bias

Sunday, August 05, 2007

Avoiding Confirmation Bias

Michael Shermer is executive director of the Skeptics Society and a columnist for Scientific American. In his July 2006 column, Shermer discussed the role of unconscious confirmation bias in determining people's inclinations in arenas such as science, law, politics, and business.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to "seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignore or reinterpret disconfirmatory evidence." As you would expect, Shermer is a proponent of staving off confirmation bias by adopting skepticism as one's default view of yet-to-be-proven assertions.

As explained at the Skeptics Society's website,

Skepticism is a provisional approach to claims. It is the application of reason to any and all ideas — no sacred cows allowed. In other words, skepticism is a method, not a position. ... When we say we are “skeptical,” we mean that we must see compelling evidence before we believe.
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Modern skepticism is embodied in the scientific method, which involves gathering data to formulate and test naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena. A claim becomes factual when it is confirmed to such an extent it would be reasonable to offer temporary agreement. But all facts in science are provisional and subject to challenge, and therefore skepticism is a method leading to provisional conclusions.

In his column, Shermer outlines how scientists combat confirmation bias:

Strict double-blind controls are required in experiments, in which neither the subjects nor the experimenters know the experimental conditions during the data-collection phase. Results are vetted at professional conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. Research must be replicated in other laboratories unaffiliated with the original researcher. Disconfirmatory evidence, as well as contradictory interpretations of the data, must be included in the paper. Colleagues are rewarded for being skeptical. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

How can a business ensure that it is operating with similar mechanisms for avoiding confirmation bias? One approach, described in an earlier post, is to use a tool like an argument map to make thinking on an issue explicit.

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Labels: Critical thinking

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