By Chris Satullo
We could use a vaccine against confirmation bias. After all, it’s one of the mental viruses keeping people from taking the COVID vaccines, propelling some of them to avoidable illness, hospitalization and death.
Confirmation bias is a term for a universal human habit: the tendency to notice, repeat and overvalue anecdotes or data points that seem to confirm what you already believe. We all do it. But some of us know that we do it. We set up warning systems to let us know we’re falling into the trap of seeing the world how we wish it was, not how it really is.
But as we’ve all settled into a segregated existence where we mostly live and socialize with people who share our values and viewpoints, the plague of confirmation bias has spread virulently across the land. It doesn’t help that, as general-audience news media dedicated to truth-telling have faded away, they’ve been replaced by bubble media that profit off of telling us what we want to hear – even when what we want to hear makes us angry and paranoid.
Case in point: The comedian, Full House TV dad, and Funniest Home Videos host Bob Saget died suddenly last Sunday at 65. Because he’d mentioned on a recent podcast that he’d received his Covid booster shot, anti-vaxxers latched onto that factoid in a nanosecond and began spreading lies that the booster was what killed him. They did the same with the recent death of comedy icon Betty White (R.I.P) – even though she died in her sleep at age 99.
The one person I know well who’s a dedicated anti-vaxxer (not out of MAGA-ness, but rather Facebook-fueled anti-jab paranoia) was quick to cite Saget’s death as proof that her suspicions of the vaccine were justified.
Every day, medical experts say – and serious media report – that nearly all the two thousand people a day who are still dying from Covid across this strange, stubborn country were unvaccinated. None of that overwhelmingly decisive data about where the true risk lies ever seeps through this person’s filters. Instead, she and so many others latched on to poor Saget’s fate as the one data point worth talking about.
You all know – or have seen on YouTube, Twitter or the news – the people who cite as gospel silly rumors or faux-science claims about the Moderna, Pfizer and J & J’s jabs. The credulous have always believed dumb rumors. What’s different now is the power the digital world gives them to spread the nonsense to other willing victims.
Nicki Minaj, telling her 22.6 million Twitter followers that a friend of her cousin in Jamaica got swollen testicles from the vaccine, gets more credence from people who fear the jab than would the testimony of 22.6 million sober and extravagantly credentialed infectious disease specialists.
Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control, recently cited an important study. It indicated that nearly every vaccinated person who died from the virus suffered from a serious risk condition, such as obesity, diabetes or cancer. In other words, the vaccines do spare the vast majority of the vaxxed from hospitalization and death – and when they don’t, it’s usually because Covid complicated an already serious health problem.
Bt overnight, MAGA-world had converted that data, which undermines a key tenet of its anti-vaccine rhetoric, into its bizarro-world opposite – by the simple expedient of ignoring and misquoting what Walensky really said. Twitter buzzed with claims that she’d “admitted” that the total Covid death toll was hyped, that the victims had really died from something else.
Confirmation bias in full, toxic bloom.
This stubborn bias of anti-vaxxers and Covid deniers deeply upsets the rest of us because the stakes of misinformation here are literally life and death. These perverse beliefs prolong a national agony that could and should have been tamed months ago.
But not a single one of us who seethes at Tucker Carlson or rolls eyes at Nicki Minaj is exempt from this root mental flaw of confirmation bias. Just today, as I searched the Internet for analysis of rising inflation, I found myself nodding at and jotting down arguments that minimized either the problem or the blame Joe Biden deserves for it. These sallies, you see, conformed to what I want to be true.
At the same time, I could feel a wall of resistance rising inside me each time I read a cogent statement that the threat is real and will cost Biden and his party grievously in the mid-terms. Don’t ask me exactly what those vinegary statements said or who made them; my brain refused to form bonds to seal them into my memory, even as it found nooks and crannies to store every pearl from Paul Krugman.
Just being aware of this mental condition is no sure safeguard against falling prey to it. Sadly, there’s no simple vaccine to quell confirmation bias. But there are mental disciplines, habits of mind, that help.
You must train yourself to take delight in the moments that force you to, as the saying goes, “revise your priors.” You have to learn to revel in the moments when you discover that something you once believed is not quite the case, when you learn that the mental “pebble in your shoe” which had been bothering you for years was warning you about a real flaw in your viewpoint or a gap in your understanding. You have to focus on the joy of learning something new and useful, rather than the defensive shame of learning that you were wrong about something.
As a journalist, I’ve been paid for decades to do the simple-sounding but challenging work of seeking out multiple sides to every story. This, it seems, has helped me develop these “revise your priors” reflexes to a greater extent than one sees in most of the people regularly declaiming about events on Twitter. I claim no special credit for this, just as my dad, trained in the now-obsolete typesetter’s craft, never lorded it over people because, thanks to his job, he could read upside down and backwards. It’s just something you had to learn to do to get paid, so you did. No reason for pride, but good reason to recommend the skill to others.
“Revising your priors” means adjusting your views when new facts and data come across your horizon – and learning to revel in, rather than rebel against, opportunities to do that. It is a skill that our wounded and bleeding democracy needs many more of its citizens to hone.
No, it’s not as easy to do as getting a life-saving vaccine jabbed into your upper arm. It takes work, patience, discipline, a sense of joy in learning, and something a little like moral courage. We’re not, as humans, naturally good at it. I’m merely mediocre, despite a lifetime of remunerated practice at it.
But the alternative to working at this skill is on display every day on Twitter, Facebook and cable news. t ain’t pretty and it’s getting uglier and more dangerous by the day.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia