Scream All You Want, Confirmation Bias Is Killing Political Debate

There’s no room for rational debate in a polarised atmosphere, unless you acknowledge confirmation bias.

What else is there to do except scream when there’s no room for reasoned debate?(Photo: iStock)

There is a spectre that is haunting Indian political journalism in English. No one, it seems, is immune to this spectre — whether they are politicians, citizens who make political statements, or the hordes on social media.

This spectre is ‘confirmation bias’.

To illustrate with an example, anyone who is learned in marxist ideology might have recognised the very first phrase in this article: “there is a spectre that is haunting...”. It is an echo of the first line of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, “A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism.”

Now a person — either on the left or the right — who has recognised that I have used Marx’s words might conclude that I am a marxist. Such a person might, for example, believe quite strongly that Marx’s ideology is idealistic but foolish, and so on the strength of that belief might conclude that I too am idealistic but foolish.

This is confirmation bias.

The truth of the matter is that I am more of a magpie than a marxist. I haven’t read Marx. And just as magpies steal objects to line their nests, I happen to collect and use sentences that I have read somewhere else.

Confirmation bias at work. (Courtesy: Chainsawsuit.com)

Confirmation Bias at Work

Let’s see how confirmation bias works in the current great big debate in India: the revolt of Indian writers against the Sahitya Akademi.

At the time of writing, 30 writers have either returned their Sahitya Akademi awards, or have resigned from the organisation.

They have done so for various reasons: Because of what they feel is the government’s inaction after writer M M Kalburgi’s murder. Because of a “culture of intolerance” in the country. And because of the Prime Minister’s silence on the Dadri lynching.

These views have been distorted as they have been amplified by politicians and opinion-makers, precisely because of confirmation bias.

Those who are anti-Modi have leapt at the chance to use these writers’ actions as proof that the writerly class is rising against the central government. Because they interpret every statement from the perspective of their own world view. Never mind that some of the writers were protesting equally against the Karnataka state government (Congress) and the inner workings of the Sahitya Akademi.

Most others see a liberal conspiracy by the writers, some even going so far as to accuse the writers of a plan to influence the ongoing Bihar elections. Never mind that these 30 writers speak different languages, espouse different causes and perhaps even harbour divergent opinions.

Confirmation bias in Dilbert. By Scott Adams. Image via https://psychlopedia.wikispaces.com/confirmation+bias

Needless to say, such distortion-by-amplification due to confirmation bias has been amplified in social media, and an already incoherent debate gets poisoned further.

Apply this to every one of the current debates, and you will see confirmation bias at work everywhere. It has infiltrated every aspect of our public discourse and makes reasonable dialogue all but impossible in most cases. No wonder society is so polarised.

Many More Types of Bias

The scary thing here is that confirmation bias is just one of the many perceptual biases that we are all subject to. For instance, the question of why Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal gets so much more coverage than any other state chief minister can be partly explained by ‘availability bias’.

As Daniel Kahneman, the 2002 Nobel Prize recipient for economics writes, the availability bias

helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the public’s mind while others are neglected. People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind.

—Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow

Of course, the disproportionate coverage of Kejriwal’s utterances is also because Delhi has a disproportionate number of publications, editors and journalists than any other city in India. Which is itself yet another factor that influences the coverage of politics.

So there you have it — confirmation bias, availability bias and the disproportionate numbers of journalists in the capital are alone responsible for a lot of what goes wrong in political journalism.

What of the many more types of biases that have been chronicled over the years? How do they affect political journalism, (and indeed every other human endeavour)? Troubling questions, and the acknowledgement of such questions will be just the first step towards accounting for them.