Confirmation Bias, We're Like a Family, and Overloading Symbols and Colors

A newsletter for curious minds

Issue No. 1

I feel fortunate to be part of this community, sharing with you all a common interest in critical thinking and imaginative, educational projects. It’s been a while since you last heard from me. A confluence of reasons, I’m afraid. But it’s great to be back.

It occurred to me the other day how wonderful it would be to start writing short, regular pieces on critical thinking. Rather than leaning solely on books, which often need years to take shape, these shorter pieces would be frequent, topical, and a little more informal. In that spirit, I was thinking,

Three practical ideas every other Thursday: one about reasoning, one about rethinking language, and one about rethinking images.

Throughout the year, you can expect at least two long-form essays on storytelling and the creative process—ideas for how to make knowledge accessible and fun to engage with.

And of course, every time there’s a new project, you’ll hear about it here first. (There might be one underway!) More on the plans for what’s to come are on the About page.

In this noisy world, I’m truly grateful for the chance to chat with you all. Plainly and informally. I hope you enjoy this first issue.

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1 Reasoning

Confirmation bias

I’m driving back from the car dealership the other day with my cousin Jimmy. And Jimmy goes, “Have you noticed something? Everyone else on the road has a blue car, just like yours.” I look to my right, and sure enough. Blue car. I wave. (They never wave back.) A few seconds go by, and there it is again. Another blue car. And then another one. “You know what, Jimmy,” I say. “You’re right, everyone does have a blue car.”

What this made-up story demonstrates is confirmation bias. A state of mind where one feeds preconceptions about someone or something. When you hold a certain view of the world, it’s tempting to only see the world through that perspective—to make note of things that corroborate your view, and discard those that don’t. One essentially starts from a conclusion, and then looks for data to confirm that conclusion, rather than seeking data to invalidate some educated guess.

This sort of approach is especially harmful when applied to people or to oneself, in the form of labeling. People turn into their labels. When the label is negative, it devours the spirit more so than anything physical could. And when it’s positive (so and so is good at Math), it can cause that person to underdevelop essential skills, like tenacity and risk-taking, on account of already being good at the thing.

When deciding what features to build into commercial software, confirmation bias steers you toward building the features you would enjoy, only to possibly discover much later that paying users want something very different. With patient care, it can cause a physician who has made a preliminary diagnosis to only seek data that supports that diagnosis, and dismiss contradictory data.¹

Protecting oneself from that tendency means remaining rooted in the domain of doubt and only making the leap to something more substantial when there’s sufficient evidence. And even then, to constantly keep one’s models of the world in check. With developing software, user studies can help inform feature introduction or feature retirement. With patient care, differential diagnoses break one out of the trap of being constrained by an initial diagnosis, until a definitive one is established through lab tests, scans, and other means.

In the case of Jimmy, abandoning his penchant for getting hung up on a conclusion, and instead starting from a guess and then trying to prove it wrong means asking, “Is every car on the road blue?” If we spot one that’s not, our candidate model of the world is dismissed right away. There’s no need to hold onto it anymore.

To go one step farther, we can reframe the question. Asking, for instance, “What made me think every car on the road was blue?” instead of, “Is every car on the road blue?” Maybe blue is, genuinely, a more popular color in this part of the country, or with cars produced by this automaker. All of a sudden, the belief has gone from a general statement of reality to a qualified one that, once corroborated, more accurately models the world.

I’ll leave you with a definition from 400 years ago:

The human understanding draws everything else to be in harmony with, and to support, those things which once please it, either because they are [generally] received and believed, or because they delight it. And, though it must be admitted that the force and the number of instances that occur to the contrary is greater, it [the understanding] either does not heed them or it disdains them; or, if it does take notice of them, it distances itself from them and dismisses them – and that not without great and pernicious prejudice – so that the authority of those previous beliefs remains inviolate.

—Francis Bacon, Novum Organum²

(A question to ponder: Can you think of an example where confirmation bias is a useful instinct? I’ll share two thoughts on that next time.)

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2 Rethinking Language

We’re like a family

It’s Friday afternoon. The weekend beckons. You’re closing up shop, about to head out, when your supervisor’s head pops up from behind a wall. He makes his way to you, stopping a few feet away. His right hand raises a coffee mug to his lips, eyes locked on yours the whole time. Slurp. Lips purse. He needs you to “go ahead and come in on Saturday” to finish processing the new inventory for Monday morning. Realizing you’re agitated, he adds, “Remember. We’re like a family here”.

Words create images in our minds, and images stir up emotions. When those emotions feel good, they can manipulate and maneuver us. They can lead to an implied equivalence, much like this example does between one’s supervisor and one’s actual family. With a phrase like, We’re a family here, one is made to feel kinship to one’s place of work—a conflation and potential contradiction, since places of work are often impersonal.

We might see this sort of associating of words to feel-good emotions anywhere where the goal is to persuade. In advertising and in public relations, for instance, words can associate a product with a timeless emotion.

How can you make two months’s salary last forever? The diamond engagement ring.

Two months’s salary for eternal love feels like a stellar deal.

Products can also make you feel good about consuming them, by appealing to feel-good, albeit ambiguous, words like natural.

“Naturally flavored with other natural flavors.”

In business, words can associate joining a risky company with a principle we care deeply about.

Our company is focused on one thing—making the world a better place.

In a boardroom or in a courtroom, words can associate a position one is taking with people we care most about.

Obviously, I want it to be me. But I genuinely think anyone would say, anyone, objectively, would say … it’s me. If we want to hold on to this company for us, for my kids, for yours … it’s me.

—Succession, Season 4, Episode 10

Candy Montgomery didn’t wake up on June 13th, 1980, with a plan to kill Betty Gore. She didn’t cook her kids breakfast … drive out to Wylie to pick up Alisa’s swimsuit, and then say, “Hey, while I’m at it …”

—Love & Death, Episode 7

It can work with impressionable antagonists too, to sway them, as in this case, from hurting two skateboarders.

Tuco: I’m gonna skin them, like javelinas!

Jimmy: Hey, think about their mother. She is a sweet little lady. She … she’s a widow. She works hard all day, every day, just like her mother before her, from dawn till dusk, scrubbing the floors of rich people. She needs a cane to walk, you know?

She’s got arthritis. And still, she works every day. What, for herself? No. No. For them. For these two, her boys, her apples of her eye.

You say they don’t deserve her? Maybe so, but they’re all she’s got. Now, you turn them inside out, I want you to think about what happens to her … Way I see it, you’re tough, but you’re fair. You’re all about justice.

Tuco: That’s what I’m saying. Justice.

—Better Call Saul, Season 1, Episode 2

In the following excerpt from a speech calling for solidarity with American farmers, we find several of those examples:

I am speaking to you about our Wrath of Grapes Boycott. Because I believe our greatest court, the court of last resort, is the American people. And I believe that once you have taken a few moments to hear this message you will concur in this verdict along with a million other North Americans who are already committed to the largest grape boycott in history. The worth of humans is involved here … I see us as one family. We cannot turn our backs on each other and our future …

Add your voice to our demands of decency as we call for [5 demands] … Until these demands of decency are met we will carry the message of the Wrath of Grapes Boycott from state to state … You have my personal pledge that every cent of your contributions will be spent on the Wrath of Grapes Campaign bringing this message into every home in America because this message is the source of our combined strength.

My friends, the wrath of grapes is a plague born of selfish men that is indiscriminately and undeniably poisoning us all. Our only protection is to boycott the grapes and our only weapon is the truth. If we unite we can only triumph for ourselves, for our children and for their children.

—Cesar Chavez, from the Wrath of Grapes Boycott speech in 1986

The sentiments in bold serve three ends. Firstly, to couple participating in the economic boycott with a quality anyone hoping to outlive their lives would gladly associate with—creating a better world for future generations. Secondly, to establish a feeling of familial unity between everyone who joins the movement. And thirdly, to speak to the character of the speaker. He carries a message, and is therefore a messenger. He gives a personal pledge, and is therefore unimpeachable. His demands are demands of decency, his weapon is the truth; he is therefore both decent and truthful.

When words persuade you, rally you, compel you, think about images and emotions, and the degree to which they influence your decisions. Feel-good associations can be purely constructive, convincing you to do something noble and worthwhile, like picking up a new skill, or building something useful, or improving the lives of other people.

On the flip side, they can be insidious when the intent is to maneuver, or they can be purveyed unwittingly in the case of well-intentioned comparisons (metaphors, similes, analogies) where the aim is to make something less familiar more familiar. In such cases, consider the degree to which the comparison is true to the thing it’s trying to make more familiar. With that very first example, the flaw in, Your work is like your family, is that—in the main—work is an at-will, ephemeral, opportunistic relationship, whereas a family isn’t.

(A question to ponder: Do you have a favorite speaker or writer? Do they use feel-good associations, and to what end? I’ll share an example from my favorite writer next time.)

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3 Rethinking Images

Overloading symbols and colors

The Guardian, April 2023

In an article on personalized cancer vaccines, we find this graphic. It spells out steps for how an mRNA vaccine would work to destroy mutated cancerous cells. Seen through my non-expert eyes, there are two things in this graphic that might potentially confuse someone:

Firstly, arrows mean different things in different places. An arrow is sometimes used to annotate (seen in all steps), sometimes to indicate one thing leads to another (as in step 4), and sometimes to indicate association (as in steps 2 and 3).

Secondly, colors and shapes mean different things in different places. A blue circle indicates the tumor’s location (as in step 1), and then blue circles indicate non-mutated genes in a genetic sequence (as in step 1).

Yellow indicates a syringe-full of mRNA molecules (start of step 4), and then yellow indicates a protein piece (end of step 4).

“Cancerous mutations” appears in pink, associating the term with pink genes in the genetic sequence, but “Tumour”, in blue, isn’t expected to be associated with blue genes in the genetic sequence.

The reason we might perceive things that are shaped or colored the same as being part of the same object comes from Gestalt’s principles of grouping. A reworked graphic that avoids those ambiguities and tells the same story might look something like the following, where no shape or pattern’s meaning is overloaded.

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In this week’s photo, dawn breaks over the city, as I walk to a cafe.

I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough, 
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
I do not ask any more delight—I swim in it, as in a sea.

—Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)

Next time, we’ll cover survivorship bias, “people are saying”, and improving a blood pressure graph’s readability.

Until then,
—Ali

1. jaad.org, ama-assn.org

2. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov