We are all guilty
It is human nature. Even when we do our best to be honest and open minded, guided by evidence, we find ourselves starting with an assumption and then working backwards from it. Our brains give emphasis to the experience and knowledge that fits, while disregarding what contradicts it. The English psychologist Peter Wason called this “confirmation bias.”
Often the problem will be an unjustified pessimism. For example, the research project Our World in Data concludes: “While the share of extremely poor people has fallen faster than ever before in history over the last 30 years, the majority of people in the UK thinks that the opposite has happened, and that poverty has increased.”
Then there was a poll in July asking what proportion in the UK it was believed had died from coronavirus. The average response was seven per cent. Given that our population is 67 million that proportion would equate to over four and half million deaths. In fact, the number is under 42,000. So that estimate is over a hundred times out.
The difficulty is that with something on the scale of coronavirus there is such an abundance of figures to quote from, including daily updates on a range of measures from each nation on the planet. If you are wanting to justify your view that the situation is better, or worse, than others suppose then inevitably figures will be quoted selectively. Scroll down the Twitter feed of Piers Morgan and you will see only the bad news gets through.
By contrast, those of us on the other side of the argument, who are sceptical about whether the national lockdown was proportionate, tend to put emphasis on the harm that has been done. One key message is the damage to the economy, which also has an impact on lives as the poorer we are the shorter the average life expectancy. The inconvenient truth for the lockdown sceptics is that the economy is recovering thus far with distinct v-shape. One can hardly say the lockdown was a trivial matter. It was an extraordinary episode that we will all remember and has not entirely finished.
Yet the prevailing story may be of the resilience of our response. The lockdown may not have saved anything like the number of lives claimed — but it may not have cost or harmed as many as sometimes though either.
Not that we optimists are blameless, whether on the pandemic or other matters. In my case, I have been a bit too keen on going to war. This is an area where optimism can be rather hazardous. When Tony Blair or David Cameron would declare we were taking action against Saddam Hussein, or the Taliban, or Muammar Gaddafi, or Bashar Assad my instinct has been to welcome it. I would underestimate the subsequent difficulties. Then when they occurred, I would conclude that it was not the action to remove the dictators that was wrong, but the details in the way it was done, or the timing, or the subsequent arrangements put in place.
I am not aware of any employers offering courses to assist us in keeping our confirmation bias in check. But something called “unconscious bias” training is all the rage – at just the point when the evidence has mounted up that it doesn’t work. Companies wishing to trumpet how “progressive” they are see it as a useful box to tick. Those taking a test are asked to say whether various images are good or bad in order to establish if they are racist or not. White people who try to get across how pro black they are still get caught out as being racist, as they are “overcompensating”. Anyone who says that past experiences are a useful guide to the future loses points.
The BBC is particularly keen on this sort of training. As it happens I suspect that even if they added “confirmation bias” training to the schedule it wouldn’t be much use. These battles against human nature are inherently futile. What is the answer? The truth can emerge through the rigour of discussion and debate. The difficulty is that with the BBC — due to the “group think” in the Corporation — it is unchallenged.
The author Matt Ridley says: “Scientists are just as prone as everybody else to confirmation bias to looking for evidence to support rather than test their ideas. So how is it that science, unlike cults and superstitions, does change its mind and find new things? Most scientists do not try to disprove their ideas; rivals do it for them. Only when those rivals fail is the theory bomb-proof.”
In the BBC — along with the rest of the broadcast media — there is an accepted narrative. It is not usually that “fake news” will be deployed. It is more that those stories that fit will be the ones that get highlighted. It is easy to predict the questions that interviewers will ask their guests. They follow a particular set of assumptions. The accepted parameters of debate get ever narrower. Some of the younger journalists on the BBC lack intellectual curiosity, wanting the Corporation to provide a “safe space” protecting them from alternative opinions, in a continuation of the cocooning they experienced at university.
Allowing room for orthodox notions to be debunked might be confusing and discomforting, but it should be at the heart of any journalistic endeavour worthy of the name. As our competing claims are challenged and disproved then — amid the noise and the dust — the open-minded can hope to grasp the reality. It has to be a robust and fearless process. Those who style themselves “progressives” by seeking to silence dissent don’t realise that it is only through the indignant clamour that progress can be made.
