Confirmation Bias: 9 Ways to Know If You're Wrong (When You Feel So Right)

When a microphone gets too close to its own speaker, a high-pitched, ear-piercing shriek emits. In the realm of sound, this is like putting two mirrors face to face: an infinite feedback loop occurs where the sound that gets picked up by the mic (even if it's very small) gets amplified by the speaker, which then gets picked up by the mic (this time louder) and gets amplified again by the speaker, and this repeats until the volume of the speaker maxes out. That sound and this phenomenon is the best analogy to describe where we are with the internet, our confirmation biases, and our politics.

We can simultaneously hold two things to be true: 1) Some people are deceived, and 2) Those who are deceived don't know (or are unwilling to admit) they are deceived, otherwise they would not be deceived. This raises a question: Can one ever know they are deceived? Or are we all doomed to be in a perpetual perceptual blind spot? Is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle at work in our ideologies, such that discovering our own internal contradictions—the place behind our eyeballs where our biases meet our perceptions—becomes impossible? How much do we choose the narratives we believe and how much do the narratives we believe choose the narratives we believe? Circular questions like these can lead us into a catatonic black hole of naval-gazing introspection, but hey, we're all pretty far deep inside our myopic rabbit holes. I think it's time we begin digging ourselves out of our dopamine addictions. Like a patient with a self-medicating pain-relief button, we've hooked ourselves on the ego-stroking quick hits of confirmation bias every time we feel the pain of uncertainty creeping up on us again. Is there any hope of escape from the life-numbing oxycontin of our internet echo chambers? Welcome to The Matrix.

We must understand that we see with our expectations as much as we see with our eyes. Our eyes are part interpretative lenses and part projectors. The lenses we've come to accept are the lenses that will determine what we see and will in turn confirm the lenses we see through. It is the essence of confirmation bias. Different witnesses to a crime or traffic accident will have discrepancies in their testimony, sometimes even large discrepancies. Our brains are wired to extrapolate and grow whatever we focus on—to find patterns and confirmation from what we ingest and then use those new grids to filter and solve the next sets of information we ingest.

Jesus confirms this phenomenon by saying the eyes are like windows to the soul. He suggests that when we see with our eyes, something comes out of us as much as there's something that goes into us. If our internal world is organized healthily—with "a body full of light"—we will see the world as we should. If our eyes are dark ("how great is that darkness," Jesus remarked), then we will only see things that verify the dark world we've come to believe. No amount of external light can make us see or can change our minds. This is what Jesus calls blindness. He warned the religious leaders that they too could see if they would only first recognize their blindness. Which begs the question, how do they (or anyone for that matter) who thinks they're not blind come to see that they are? 

I think it's as simple as it is subtle. It starts with a self-ward suspicion that sounds like the question: "What if I'm wrong?" "What if I'm missing something?" "If I was wrong, how would I know it?" Following these questions (instead of your neighbor's convictions or a mob's anger) leads us to our internal world. Why don't I have as much joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control flowing from me as I see coming from that person? Here are some symptoms to look for that you or a loved one have fallen victim to deception:

1. Attraction to controversy and narratives that make you feel like a victim;

2. Fear or suspicion of people in authority;

3. Anxiety or despair over an unknown future;

4. Increased drive to become politically active with a decreased willingness to talk about politics or ideology with real-life people face-to-face (or strained relationships with friends or family because of heated political disagreement);

5. Joining virtual online groups based on politics or ideology to feel a sense of belonging;

6. The need to judge all evidence for yourself before you accept its validity;

7. Less laughter and mirth;

8. Inability to cry and a proclivity to anger;

9. An urge to violence, destructiveness, or harm, instead of articulation (which is one constructive purpose of anger after it has been processed through grief);

If any of these resonate and you suspect you might be open to deception, and don't know what to do next, take heart: suspecting you might be lost (as uncomfortable as it is) is actually one of the safest places you can be. It's the precursor to what the Bible calls repentance—essentially confessing that you are your own echo chamber and you'd like help from a higher power to get outside yourself. This is as difficult as the blind seeing again and as easy as speaking the following words, "I don't know if I'm blind. I might be. God, if you're there, help me to see as you see. I don't want to be the blind leading the blind, or the blind following the blind, or any kind of blindness that confirms I'm right or keeps me stuck. If I'm blind, Jesus, please heal me. Open my eyes!"

If you recognize some of the above signs in one of your friends or loved ones—if you suspect they are getting radicalized by rage and angst, and if you've never gently confronted them, start by expressing your concern over their lack of joy or their not seeming themselves. Sometimes planting a simple question and a gentle expression of concern that demonstrates you are invested in their personal joy is enough to sow a seed of doubt in their ideological rightness, even if you don't spar with them intellectually. An intellectual argument will only send the already-convinced on a search for more evidence or argumentation to combat you next time (and they will find it). But a gentle word backed by the power of love will be a domino that will eventually take down the house of cards from the inside. With gentle wisdom well-applied, you don't need to enter another person's dreams to plant a new desire or idea; inception's most successful tactic is love. Anything coming from a heart of love will eventually work it’s way into someone's heart: "I want you to know I am for you and not against you. I am concerned for what you've been engaging in and I fear that an older, wiser, and gentler version of yourself will look back with tears of regret. This issue needs your energy to build and transform it from the inside, not tear it down from the outside. I believe in you and in your ability to get it done in the right ways."

Assuming you've already tried gently confronting their interests with non-judgmental, open-ended questions, all there is left to do is keep pouring in the light. Keep adding positive distractions to the narratives they are consuming. And keep hoping and praying that their eyes would open and see the world with eyes full of light (peace, joy, and righteousness in the Holy Spirit). My favorite line from all the Star Wars movies comes from Rose to Finn, "We win not by destroying what we hate but by saving what we love."

I am reminded of what one theologian called the greatest heresy of all: the heresy of failing to love. Jesus called love the greatest commandment. Paul said that without love, we are nothing (even if we can understand all mysteries and all knowledge, it would be nothing more than a clanging gong, a noisy and annoying symbol, 1 Cor. 13). Jesus also said, "where 2 or 3 are gathered in my name, there I am with them." He can only fully manifest himself in our midst when many voices and perspectives are present. We weren't meant to see or experience the world alone, or through one prevailing myopic worldview. To do so would be cancerous. It would be unbearable. It would be hell.

We are all susceptible to deception. And we have all contributed to this cultural phenomenon—this Catch-22 of alternate realities becoming competing realities. Every time we've stoked the fire instead of diffusing tensions, every time we've been snarky in a comment, every time we've said "idiots" under our breath, every time we've celebrated someone else's angry diatribe (typically against a scarecrow caricature of an idea rather than against a real person), every time we've lost faith in humanity, we have been complicit with the spirit of the age. We must endeavor to learn the ways of nonviolence—not only physical nonviolence but also nonviolence in communication. We must repudiate the twisted, worldly form of power that brandishes violence in one hand and fear in the other. We must commit ourselves to learn the empowering ways of Jesus and his kingdom because everything about the ways of Jesus and his kingdom looks like the fruit of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. If it doesn't look like that, it's not his kingdom. If it's not his kingdom, then it will not last. You can take that to the bank, especially when you or your party has suffered loss. Jesus said his kingdom could never be shaken.

I feel therefore I am. My feelings are connected to my stimuli—my agency affects my stimuli, which in turn affects my feelings. There is not supposed to be any contradiction or feedback distortion in this natural system—only flow: action, reaction, stimuli, feeling, emotion, and more action building momentum for greater truth and beauty in the unfolding artwork of creation. With these three things vaccinating us from deception:

1. Turning our anger into grief;

2. Being open to being wrong;

3. Confronting each other with gentleness and love,

we will stay in love (even with our “enemies”), be filled with hope for the future (individually, nationally, and globally), and experience joy in the present. This is how we steer clear of the greatest heresy of all and participate in the kingdom work of making Heaven’s garden experiment on earth more manifest.