Have you heard of something called the confirmation bias? Researchers discovered that when people hear an argument that opposes their viewpoint, the rational part of the brain takes a coffee break and the emotional side takes over. The irrational part of your brain then reinterprets reality in a way that lets you keep your dumb viewpoint against all common sense and evidence.
For example, if you and I had an argument about whether creatures could fly by flapping their wings, common sense would tell you that pointing to birds flying overhead would end the debate. But it wouldn’t. Whoever held the opinion that creatures can’t fly by flapping wings would argue that birds aren’t actually creatures, or that it’s the feathers that let them fly, not just the wings, or that humans can’t flap their arms and fly. In other words, the loser of the debate would start saying stuff that sounds incredibly stupid to everyone except the person saying it. That’s the confirmation bias at work.
Now I have a confession. In my recent blog posts I was setting you up to elicit the confirmation bias effect so I could write about it. Here’s the sequence of events:
1. In a recent blog I said it was possible that the Islamic countries in the Middle East could someday form one unified Islamic-ruled entity – a caliphate.
2. Many people commented that this would be “impossible” (not merely unlikely) because there are too many ethnic and tribal and religious differences in the region. So far, this is a rational point backed up by a good reason. No confirmation bias yet.
3. At this point I saw an opportunity to elicit the confirmation bias, so I went for it.
4. I obliterated the “too many differences” argument by pointing out that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had all of those differences and yet it stayed together, albeit with the use of extreme brutality. Obviously a hypothetical caliphate could use the same method. Case closed, right?
This is like my bird example. Once I pointed out that the presumed impossible has actually already happened in Iraq, you’d think people would say something like “Oh. Good point. You are right.” Iraq isn’t even the exception that proves the rule. Almost every country in the Middle East is a hodgepodge of religious and ethnic groups, and they all manage to hang together, at least for a while.
That’s when the confirmation bias kicked in, as I had hoped. The responses to my obliteration of the “too many differences” argument included these ridiculous counterpoints:
1. Saddam Hussein didn’t stay in power to infinity.
2. Iraq was secular under Saddam.
3. The British created Iraq, not Saddam.
4. The different factions would not volunteer to join the caliphate.
Here’s the cool part. Those points seem absurd or off point to everyone except the people who made them. The confirmation bias turned off their powers of reason and let them stay attached to their prior opinion even as its foundation disappeared.
By way of contrast, someone made a good argument in one of the posts that might end up changing my prediction for the future of the Middle East. I predicted that terrorists will improve their methods until some evil leader in the U.S. decides to eliminate Islam to solve the problem. The best competing prediction I saw here is that the Internet and Al-Jazeera would eventually erode the power of dictators, eliminate the state sponsorship of terror, and produce enough “rats” that the terrorists couldn’t hide. That’s a reasonable prediction even if you think some other future is more likely. Let’s all hope for that one.