Confirmation Bias Poem by gershon hepner

The forces that control how we behave are hidden, and
unconscious biases controlling us are so pervasive
that if we truly hope objectively to understand
our actions we must see the biases that are pervasive.

Confirmation bias makes us notice only what
supports what we already think, and brush off what is not
supportive. Surely it is due to confirmation bias
that agnostics are agnostic, and the pious pious.

Susan Pinker, author of “The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women and the Real Gender Gap, ” reviews Shankar Vedantam’s “The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives” (“The Out-of-Sight Mind, ” NYT Book Review, January 17,2010) :

Invisible forces that control our behavior have inspired our best story¬tellers, from Euripides to Steven Spielberg. Whether we’re yanked around by jealous gods, Oedipal urges or poltergeists, the idea that we feel powerless to direct our own actions has a visceral appeal, one exploited by Shankar Vedantam in “The Hidden Brain, ” his exploration of the unconscious mind. Most previous popular treatments of subliminal forces haven’t been data driven. Vedantam, who until recently wrote the Department of Human Behavior column for The Washington Post, hopes to fill that gap. His entertaining romp through covert influences on human behavior began as a series of columns, and true to its genesis, it reads as vivid reportage overlaid with a sampling of science. Ranging widely from the role of social conformity in violence to snapshots of racial and gender prejudice, Vedantam draws expansive arcs between findings from social psychology and the nation’s sensibilities and voting patterns. “Unconscious bias reaches into every corner of your life, ” he writes, thanks to a “hidden brain” generally inaccessible through introspection. As with crop circles, all we see are the traces left by covert attitudes, never the perp at the scene of the crime…Meanwhile, the biggest bias of all — confirmation bias, which makes us notice only what supports our own opinions and tune out everything else — hardly gets a mention. All this secret stuff can be very disconcerting. But we need more than we get here to know if it is true.

1/17/10