Let’s talk about people with biased beliefs

There is a popular belief about identifying our heart with feelings and our brain with everything rational. But as you can imagine, it's a mistake. Irrationality is part of the functioning of our nervous system, which includes our own brain.

One of the characteristic of our behavior in which this irrational aspect is most notable is the cognitive biases, that is, distortions in the way we reason that usually are unconscious and involuntary, confirmatory bias is probably the most common example of this, it happens way more than we might think and it results in having biased beliefs.

Hints from psychological literature suggest that information, regardless of valence, is encoded within the mind, but isn’t necessarily used to update beliefs. | Source

What is this all about?

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Well, confirmatory bias is a pretty common concept, “this is our tendency to pay closer attention to evidence and arguments that support our own firmly held conclusions, and to simply discount contradictory evidence. This could partially explain the tendency of large numbers of people to hold fast to their attachments to one political party or another. Once we decide, we don't like to re-decide.” | Source

According to the above definition, this issue is simply about having the propensity to give more importance and credibility to the information that fit our beliefs than to those that contradict them, even if both points have sufficient data backing them up equally, which will mean than any objective person would remain neutral, but this is not the case with someone who suffers from bias that are capable of clouding his judgment.

This bias is not only negative because it makes it difficult for our ideas to change, which can be a huge problem if our ideas are mistaken. In addition, under its influence there is the possibility of believing that totally questionable thoughts are some kind of revealed truths and purely objective knowledge that would be unwise to put under suspicion. That is to say, this is the worst enemy of the objective mind, given that it constantly reinforces the ideas that we have automatically decided to believe at all costs, without analyzing anything.

What roles does cognitive dissonance have on this?

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It is actually at the center of everything because it consists of the feeling of discomfort that we experience when an idea comes into conflict with one of our beliefs.

Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. This produces a feeling of discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance, etc. | Source

Sometimes we learn to manage this discomfort in a constructive way by modifying our explanations about reality, and sometimes we do not get it and we simply manipulate those ideas in any way so that the importance of what we have been believing from before prevails.

To better understand what biased beliefs is all about and the way in which cognitive dissonance can be mismanaged, I will share with you some examples to help clarify this subject even more.

Examples about this

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Let’s imagine that a person after visiting some websites belonging to a racist and extremist group, begins to think about the idea that the immigrant population of several under developed countries is less intelligent than him.

According to this perspective, the poverty and the low scientific development that are present in these regions would be due to a lower intelligence in the population. This is an attractive idea, because it gives him a simple explanation about a fact that he previously thought was more complex, and thanks to this, and even if he does not realize it, that person begins to associate the poverty and misfortunes suffered in these areas to the supposed low intelligence of the people living there.

However, since his ideas are very different than the ones of many of his friends and family, this person's beliefs are soon confronted. Some say that taking for granted the intellectual inferiority of the immigrant is completely wrong, therefore the person realizes that whoever replies in this way is known to be an activist opposed to him, and ends up assuming that those opposed to him have a vision of reality distorted by propaganda. This means that he does not take into account anything that opposes his views, he intermediate ignores it.

In the future, this person will look at all the representations of immigrant people that appear in public and in the media, and every time he sees a murder case by an immigrant, for example, he will attribute it to the “impossibility” of this immigrant to have a civilized life. On the other hand, when he sees another immigrant who has been successful in life and has excellent education and discipline, he will attribute it to the influence that the local people (non immigrants) have had on him.

The fact is, no matter what happens, this person will not change his believes about immigrant people, no matter what argument is presented, he has already made up his mind, and there is no way to change it.

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Of course, there could tons of more examples about this, like when it comes to different ideological views which is always a very delicate subject with a lot of fanatics.

Conclusion

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As we have seen in the example, having biased beliefs can have dramatic consequences in the way we interpret reality. For example, it can make the simpleness of a belief to be seen as a positive aspect of it, regardless of the dangers of simplification, it can lead us to circular thinking, because such a simple belief explains everything and at the same time does not explain anything.

Why would one fail to use information that is available to them? From what we’ve seen, people are willing to update their beliefs in the presence of good news but not bad news. By definition, good news is attractive and bad news is aversive. | Source

The people that have the tendency to adopt biased beliefs let every experience that can be used to reinforce said beliefs capture their attention immediately, while those that contradict them are ignored, avoiding anything that could threaten their own way of interpreting the world.

Have you ever adopted biased beliefs deliberately? If so, why?