Duke: Preexisting beliefs drive information processing rather than facts shaping beliefs
Annie Duke · Annie Duke – Thinking More in Bets (Capital Allocators, EP.76) · Nov 19, 2018 · at 15:31
Annie Duke discusses the cognitive mechanics of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias during a live podcast recording.
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“It's that we form beliefs in a relatively haphazard way, and then those beliefs actually drive the way we process information. So what ends up happening is kind of twofold. One is that we notice information that confirms the beliefs that we already have. So you're looking through Google News, and you're seeing the stuff that agrees with you, and you don't see the stuff that doesn't agree with you so much. That's confirmation bias. That's pretty well known. But a bigger problem that people don't talk about it as much is that when we are confronted with information that disagrees with us, we work very hard to disconfirm it. So what happens is, you know, I'm in the morning, I'm reading political articles, I see something that agrees with me, I practically don't get past the headline, I just go, yay me, I'm so right, says this person who's just written this, and when I see something that disagrees with me that I read, I'll write a dissertation on it. This is why it's wrong, these are the facts they're not including, this is why they're biased, So I work very hard to make sure it's not true, and then the other thing is that when information comes from out of tribe, we don't trust it, so it can actually cause us to entrench more. So what happens is that instead of the information in the world driving Our belief formation, what happens is that the beliefs we have actually drive the way we process the information, and they drive it in a particular way to reinforce the beliefs we already have, and we get this circular pattern called motivated reasoning.”
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