From Confirmatory Thinking to Exploratory Thinking: A Look at Electoral Biases

From Confirmatory Thinking to Exploratory Thinking: A Look at Electoral Biases

Omid Ghaem Panah

We have various evidence showing that we do not make decisions based on reasoning as much as we imagine. Perhaps our most important support in this regard is confirmation bias[1]. We all reward and praise ourselves when we give the right answer; we like to be right and not make mistakes. For this reason, we also tend to pay attention to evidence that confirms our beliefs and opinions. Such a bias is called confirmation bias. In this bias, our desire has a greater impact than our thinking ability. In politics as well, individuals try to focus solely on the evidence, information, and events they approve of and present them as supporting their viewpoint. Conversely, however, regarding opposing evidence, they either lack the necessary scrutiny and meticulousness and are more intent on demonstrating its invalidity, or they present and critique it in a weak manner (the straw man fallacy), or they offer such a different interpretation that no conflict arises.

Furthermore, our brain has an availability bias[2], meaning that if processing and examination are to take place, it uses the information readily available—that is, for example, the very media and networks to which we have exposed ourselves provide the information necessary for decision-making, information that is, of course, insufficient and incomplete, and recalling this same information is also easier than information that is not constantly available to us. For instance, in Daniel Kahneman and Tversky's experiment, when people were asked whether there are more words whose first letter is k or those whose third letter is k, the majority incorrectly said words starting with k, the reason being that recalling these words is easier than recalling words whose third letter is k[3].

Or, for example, the influence of your presuppositions also affects the perception of information. Nisbett shows that expectations and presuppositions cause you to see the world (and information) not as it is, but as you want it to be, and therefore, if you have a negative presupposition about a subject, it leads to a distortion in your thinking. Nisbett also points to the vividness of information; he says people usually pay more attention to vivid, clear, concrete, and compact information. Several factors play a role in the vividness of information, such as emotional appeal, concreteness and imaginability, and spatial and temporal proximity[4]. Interestingly, these factors also play an effective role in memorization and memory retrieval.

In addition to information, interests are also influential in decision-making. Of course, it is a common saying that people choose their candidate based on personal interest, but Drew Westen[5], through his experiments, has shown that people vote based on the interests of the group they belong to (racial, regional, religious, etc.) more than they vote based on their own interests. In his experiment, he demonstrated that people employ reasoning when they need it to justify their desired conclusion; otherwise, in other cases, they suffice with their emotional and intuitive processes[6]. Social factors, of course, affect our thinking and decisions in various ways, from societal pressure and conformity with the crowd to the biases we hold towards in-groups and out-groups, and for example, we tend to evaluate our group's identity positively and even exaggerate about it, considering wrong behaviors as accidental or attributing them to contextual reasons.

Such instances that influence our information and decision-making, and in which noise is, so to speak, introduced, are numerous, and therefore we are not, as we imagine, slaves to reason, but rather slaves to our own intuitions. But does this mean there is no hope? Tetlock distinguishes between two types of thinking: exploratory thinking[7] and confirmatory thinking[8]. In exploratory thinking, we examine and evaluate all available viewpoints in order to make the right decision based on them. In confirmatory thinking, however, the individual's entire effort is devoted to justifying and confirming the viewpoint they already hold. In situations where there is pressure for accountability, the effort to justify and demonstrate the correctness of one's performance actually increases, and in other words, confirmatory thinking increases. So accountability does not necessarily lead to exploratory thinking; nevertheless, it is when three conditions are met that the likelihood of an increase in exploratory thinking exists:

1- Decision-makers know before making their decision that they will later have to be accountable to their audience.

2- The audience's opinion is unknown.

3- Decision-makers believe that their audience is informed and inclined to make the right decision[9].

Perhaps by providing such conditions, one can hope that exploratory thinking will become more prominent. In this regard, the responsibility of individuals, advertisers, candidates, and so on seems to play a key role, and it is better for such a demand to be seriously placed on the agenda for anyone who promotes an opinion; the fact that individuals know in advance that they will have to answer for their words in the future and bear responsibility may, to some extent, neutralize confirmatory biases.

[1] Confirmation bias

[2] Availability bias

[3] Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), 207–232. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90033-9

[4] Nisbett, R. E., & Ross, L. (1980). Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings of social judgment. Prentice Hall.

[5] Drew Westen

[6] Westen, D., Blagov, P. S., Harenski, K., Kilts, C., & Hamann, S. (2006). Neural bases of motivated reasoning: An fMRI study of emotional constraints on partisan political judgment in the 2004 U.s. presidential election. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18(11), 1947–1958. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2006.18.11.1947

[7] Exploratory thought

[8] Confirmatory thought

[9] Lerner, J. S., & Tetlock, P. E. (1999). Accounting for the effects of accountability. Psychological Bulletin, 125(2), 255–275. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.125.2.255