Why Do People Have Gaping Blind Spots?

As I discussed previously, cognitive dissonance can cause us to rationalize and justify all sorts of strange beliefs and illogical decisions, but it has other effects as well.

Recall that cognitive dissonance causes us to deal with new incompatible information by either discarding our initial belief, or by dismissing the new information. It turns out that our brain has a strong preference for the latter. It would much prefer a stable set of beliefs rather than a constantly changing set. That way, the world seems to make more sense. The problem is, this can lead to an effect known as confirmation bias.

Professional Bias

As Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson describe in their book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), confirmation bias causes us to more readily accept information that confirms what we already know, and more likely to ignore or rationalize away information that isn’t compatible. We see what we want to see. It’s just another way the brain avoids cognitive dissonance.

The biggest problem with confirmation bias is that those with the strongest beliefs are those that are most likely to be affected by it. For example, all the big name experts in a particular field are some of the least likely people to be able to change their minds and admit to mistakes. Cognitive dissonance is strongest in them because they have the most to lose. In many cases, they’ve invested years or decades of their lives into an idea, so they’re not likely to want to admit that they wasted that much time on something that’s wrong – they’re supposed to be “experts”…

George Bush is a poster boy for this outcome. The more things go wrong in Iraq, the more he believes that it was the right thing to do, the more he comes up with new justifications…

Selective Memory

Cognitive dissonance also affects your memories. We like to think that our memories are accurate and objective, but they’re not. It’s not so much that we forget things, as much as we seem to remember ourselves more favorably or alter events to better fit our beliefs – i.e. we are all revisionist historians!

One of my first experiences with this process was late in my late teens – another teen and I had an “altercation”. A few hours later we were asked to recount the events as we remembered them. Incredibly, his story was completely different (and incompatible) with mine. It could have been he was lying to avoid getting in trouble, but I don’t think so. I think his brain had colored his memory and generated rationalizations for his actions in order to justify his bad behavior. I think he was describing events exactly as he remembered them. In the end, neither of our stories could be proven so it could just as easily have been me revising history. Either way, it was an eye-opening experience as to the malleability of the “truth”.

Selective memory also affects how we record history. There was a controversy a few years ago with an exhibit at the Canadian War Museum about the bombing of Germany in the World War II. The original text on the exhibit read:

“The value and morality of the strategic bomber offensive against Germany remains bitterly contested. Bomber Command’s aim was to crush civilian morale and force Germany to surrender by destroying its cities and industrial installations. Although Bomber Command and American attacks left 600,000 Germans dead and more than five million homeless, the raids resulted in only small reductions of German war production until late in the war.”

Seems perfectly reasonable to me… But some people were upset by it and asked (and eventually succeeded) to have the text changed to:

“Thousands perished in the raids and millions were left homeless. While these numbers are very large, they pale in comparison to the genocide perpetrated…by the Germans and their proxies.”

Mistakes were made, but theirs were worse. Who writes history? The winner of course…

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Why do good things happen to people with high self-esteem, and bad things seem to happen to people with low self-esteem like a big self-fulfilling prophecy? They don’t actually, it’s just how we remember things. If you have high self-esteem, you expect good things to happen to you – so when bad things do happen, confirmation bias shields you from it and you quickly forget the bad and only remember the good. The opposite would be true for people with low self-esteem, who will wallow in their perceived misfortune. It’s not positive thinking that brings us good things, it’s positive remembering that does.

We can’t actually change the way our brains work, but we can learn to recognize when they are playing tricks on us…

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