CONFIRMATION BIAS
If you wanted safety information on a used
car, would it be wiser to trust the word of a used car salesperson or the
findings of a consumer report? I hope that you would trust the consumer report
over the salesperson because the salesperson has a vested interest in the
quality of his products and an even larger one in getting you to accept his
opinion on his products. The consumer report, on the other hand, would likely have
no interest in advancing a one-sided view of any product. Similarly, if you
wanted to obtain information on the historicity and veracity of Islam, would
you ask an Islamic scholar who has been taught about
Islamic sanctity since childhood, or would you ask a secular scholar with no
emotional investment in Islam? Would you not also do the same for Hinduism,
Mormonism, Buddhism, etc? If you utilize the same reasoning and choose the
unbiased scholar in each instance, as you very well should, why make an exception
only for Christianity? People who study a concept in which they have no
emotional investment are going to offer more reliable conclusions than those
who want the concept to yield a specific result. The decision in each case should
be easy.
Scholars who began with no emotional
investments in Christianity present the most unbiased conclusions on
Christianity simply because they are more open during their studies to accept
evidence that contradicts their tentative conclusions. Just as the used car
salesperson will be hesitant to acknowledge and relay information that is
damaging to the quality of his vehicles, the Christian scholar will be hesitant
to acknowledge and relay information that is damaging to the veracity of his
religion. We have no reason to think that belief in Christianity provides a
special insight into the veracity of it because every religion can make a
parallel claim. The opinions of individuals with ego involvement, emotional
investments, or vested interests in the outcome of a
debatable issue are less likely to change when confronted with new information
because people have an innate inclination to seek only evidence that confirms
their pre-established beliefs. We can describe this phenomenon, termed confirmation bias, as the tendency to
seek out answers that will confirm our beliefs and ignore answers that will
not. Research has long established the presence of this phenomenon in
persuasive psychology.
According to Shermer, psychologists have
discovered a process that people follow when given the task of selecting the
right answer to a problem. Individuals (a) will immediately
form a hypothesis and look only for examples to confirm it, (b) do not seek
evidence to disprove the hypothesis, (c) are very slow to change the hypothesis
even when it is obviously wrong, (d) adopt overly-simple hypotheses or
strategies for solutions if the information is too complex, and (e) form
hypotheses about coincidental relationships they observe if there is no true
solution.[i]
Moreover, by adopting these overly simple hypotheses and strategies for complex
issues, we gain immediate gratification.