Confirmation Bias 101

Confirmation Bias 101
I used to be a bartender...
It was only for a couple of years, back in he '90s. And it was mostly beer & wine. But we did have a full bar, so I knew by heart how to make all of your standard cocktails. (But mostly Sea Breezes, if I'm bein' honest.)
So when I was at a party recently and somebody asked "How do you make a Black Russian?" Naturally, I told them "Kahlua & vodka." (Always happy to help!)
But then the host of the party chimed in: "No, no, it's Kahlua, vodka ...and COKE."
I was perplexed. Admittedly, it's been a long time since I actually mixed a drink (professionally), so maybe somehow I forgot that there was Coca Cola in a Black Russian. Or maybe times (& tastes) have changed and Coke is now de rigueur in a proper Black Russian. Or maybe, god forfend, I was living in an anti-coke bubble back in the 1990s and I was simply taught, incorrectly, how Black Russians were made in the first place!
Still, I was pretty sure I had to be right about this. So the host offered to settle the matter by looking up the recipe for Black Russians on the internet.
Sounds fair, so clickety-click, he googles it up, and 2 seconds later turns the screen to show me a recipe for a Black Russian. And indeed, the correct answer for those playing along at home was...
Kahlua & vodka! ...and Coke.
:o
Needless to say, I was pretty stunned. But there it was in black and white pixels. On a very official-looking website with bartender emojis and martini.gifs and the whole works.
It was a very unsettling experience for me, discovering that I had been so wrong about something so obvious. And for so many years!
And then I noticed something else...
In the search window that my friend had used to google this page, he had typed:
"black russian" +"kahlua" +"coke"
In other words, he did not asked the Internet to find a Recipe for a Black Russian. He asked it specifically to look for a Black Russian recipe that included... +"coke"
Naturally, the internet rewarded him with dozens of recipes for Black Russians made with Coke. And Ð just as naturally Ð ZERO recipes for Black Russians without!
:P
I honestly don't think my friend was *trying* to be shifty. He just knew that the fastest way to find a recipe that listed ALL the ingredients was to search for all the ingredients.
But he wasn't seeking INFORMATION. He was seeking CONFIRMATION that the answer he already had was already correct.
;)
So this is basically how CONFIRMATION BIAS works.
If you seek only proof that you were right all along, you will always find it. But it doesn't bring you any closer to knowing what you're talking about.
A bartender can google "margarita" +"vodka" +"orange juice" and they'll definitely get thousands of hits. But they still won't know the first thing about making a Margarita.
And tragically, the more unvetted misinformation you reward yourself with, the more deeply convinced you become that your pre-conceived notions were absolutely right all along.
But it's not "research".
This is why conspiracy theories are so hard to break. Once someone decides they *want* to believe something, there's simply no way to convince them otherwise.
:(
Sadly, confirmation bias is part of the human condition. It's not exclusive to one political party or the other. We ALL naturally prefer ideas that re-affirm our world-view over new ideas that shake things up.
Change is unsettling. Confirmation is relaxing.
Nobody wants to rethink things that have been working fine for years now. ("If it ain't broke, don't throw it out with the bathwater!")
But if you're not capable of the self-reflection to consider that you might possibly be mistaken about something once in a while, then you can't trust that anything you "know" is actually correct. And neither should anyone else.
And you certainly shouldn't be running for President.
;)