I speak only from my own experiences, of course, based on learning about this peculiarity of our minds from my grandmother at age six. Every time I ran crying to her when something “went wrong,” she would always stop me, calm me down, then ask me if I was telling her what my mind thought about what happened or if I was telling her what happened. By practicing that distinction between what happened versus what my mind interpreted, I find that I am able to see this in action within my own mind, and of course in the minds of others. Some folks think me quite weird, in fact, when I suddenly point out potentially flawed assumptions or interpretive reasoning behind my own opinions.

I’m going to stop you again, since I’m relatively certain some of you are thinking that I just said I don’t suffer from biased cognition. Quite the contrary! I am merely saying that I can habitually see biased cognition in operation, even within myself, due to practicing this mental distinction exercise repeatedly for 36 years. On the flip side, I do sometimes wonder if I invent a perception of biased cognition because that’s what I expect to see, but that’s a rabbit hole I don’t want to follow just now.

Suffice to say, I don’t feel humanity is saddled with this mental habit of believing what best supports our existing opinions, even if reality is quite different. We evolved this way in the first place, so I fully believe we will evolve differently over time as humanity grows and develops.

What I currently don’t understand, however, is how anyone could deny that we humans do this, when the preponderance of evidence is absolutely overwhelming! I fully expect, at some future date, that the humans of the future will look back at us and say “We used to be so insane!”

“Even when the evidence was going against them, Nobel prize-winners Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman clung on to cherished theories just because they thought they were “beautiful”…
Paul Dirac famously asserted that: “It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.” Richard Feynman, too, insisted on believing in one of his theories even when it seemed to contradict experimental data. “There was a moment when I knew how nature worked,” he wrote in 1957. “[The theory] had elegance and beauty.”…

Despite the high reputation of the physicists responsible for the actual experiments, Feynman and Gell-Mann’s response was that there was something wrong with the experiments. They were right. Thus although experiments are essential for scientific theories, certain theories are just too important – too beautiful, one could say –to be discarded when the experiments don’t go your way.

– A Thing Of Beauty (Arthur I Miller)

–dk

But motivated reasoning outside of a controlled study can never be pinned down. Think of it this way. I know that of the 100 employess I hire only 20 of them will deliver 80% of the goodness I hired them for. The obvious solution is to continuously cull at least the bottom 20% because these individuals actually detract from good outcomes. This is a just so story. The real trick – correctly FINDING the lower 20% is now the big problem to solve. But what are the factoids and what probability do I assign to the evidence that Joe is a water cooler jockey that detracts from the strategic and tactical success of the organization. Again, the HR manager thinks Joe is okay because he turns in his performance objectives on time and always meets the idiotic HR guidelines while guarding the water cooler.

Which facts wins the day? What alternative facts lose the day?

Of course this is just my cognitive bias, I could be wrong.