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If a person is unaware that red lenses have been implanted inside his eyes and he visits a house with white furniture, he would be seeing red furniture even though they are white. Naturally he would believe that the furniture in the house are all in red. As he moves from room to room, he would see more and more red furniture (when they are actually white). He would hence find more and more evidence that reinforce or support his wrong belief that the furniture in the house are all in red. 

Unknown to many of us, we suffer from the above problem. We are also seeing things through the lenses we wear, just that our lenses refer to our belief-system. 

We tend to see or understand things, events and information through our belief-system. For example, the same Covid-19 pandemic may be viewed quite differently between an atheist, a Buddhist and a Christian. A Buddhist may interpret it as an evidence supporting his belief on the Buddhist metaphysical system of kamma, dukkha, samsara, rebecoming and Nibbana.  An atheist may see it as an evidence for his unbelief or disbelief about God’s existence because he believes that the existence of suffering is inconsistent with the existence of God. A Christian may understand it as an evidence supporting his belief that God created this world as a temporary training place in which sufferings exist as a necessary condition to train people to develop various virtues such as courage, compassion, sacrificial love, and perseverance, so that they may become virtuous persons suitable for a more permanent future world.

The above phenomenon of different persons understanding the same experience/information differently such that each sees it as an evidence that reinforces their different beliefs is what psychologists called Confirmation Bias.

What is Confirmation Bias?

Confirmation Bias is the tendency to reinforce/confirm one’s existing beliefs by treating experiences/evidence in a biased manner (often unconsciously) such as by:

1) Interpreting one’s experiences in a way that confirms or reinforces one’s beliefs, even if those experiences could be equally interpreted in an opposite way that would contradict those beliefs.

2) Noticing or paying attention to evidence that reinforces one’s beliefs while being inattentive or blind towards evidence that contradicts those beliefs.

3) Cherry-picking, favouring, or searching for only evidence that supports one’s existing beliefs, while ignoring or dismissing evidence that contradicts those beliefs.

4) Accepting easily evidence that supports one’s beliefs, while being very sceptical or critical towards evidence that contradicts those beliefs. For example, accepting easily the reports of miracles in one’s religion while using stringent criteria of authenticity to reject the reports of miracles given by other religions.

Testing Our Beliefs

Due to confirmation bias, the more we test our beliefs about our worldview/religion to see if they are supported by evidence, the more evidence we would discover that support those beliefs. This is similar to the person wearing red lenses: the more he moves around to see more furnitures,  the more evidence he discovers that would confirm his wrong belief that those furniture are all in red, when in fact they are all in white.

Our confirmation bias makes it difficult for us to know whether our beliefs are actually false, just as the red lenses inside a person’s eyes make it difficult for him to know whether his belief about red furniture is false.

Therefore, to know whether our beliefs are true or false, it is not enough to see whether they are supported by evidence. There is a very different and very important way of testing our beliefs about our worldview/religion such that, DESPITE OUR CONFIRMATION BIAS, it would still be able to reveal to us whether our beliefs are true or false.

The next blog post would be about how to test our beliefs in a way that greatly minimize, if not eliminate, the distorting effect of our confirmation bias.

Meanwhile below is a good video showing an experiment done on people in the public regarding this topic. It shows that when people seek confirmation on what they suspect or believe (wrongly) to be the truth, it would tend to reinforce their false suspicion/belief.