confirmation bias—a tendency to believe things that reinforce our existing views, to see what we want to see.
One of the first and best studies of confirmation bias comes from the end of the college football season in 1951—Princeton versus Dartmouth. Princeton hadn’t lost a game all season. Its quarterback, Dick Kazmaier, had just been on the cover of
Princeton won, but afterward there were recriminations in both college’s papers. Princetonians blamed Dartmouth for starting the low blows; Dartmouth thought Princeton had an ax to grind once their quarterback got hurt. Luckily, there were some psychologists on hand to make sense of the conflicting versions of events.
They asked groups of students from both schools who hadn’t seen the game to watch a film of it and count how many infractions each side made. Princeton students, on average, saw 9.8 infractions by Dartmouth; Dartmouth students thought their team was guilty of only 4.3. One Dartmouth alumnus who received a copy of the film complained that his version must be missing parts—he didn’t see any of the roughhousing he’d heard about. Boosters of each school saw what they wanted to see, not what was actually on the film.
Philip Tetlock, a political scientist, found similar results when he invited a variety of academics and pundits into his office and asked them to make predictions about the future in their areas of expertise. Would the Soviet Union fall in the next ten years? In what year would the U.S. economy start growing again? For ten years, Tetlock kept asking these questions. He asked them not only of experts, but also of folks he’d brought in off the street— plumbers and schoolteachers with no special expertise in politics or history. When he finally compiled the results, even he was surprised. It wasn’t just that the normal folks’ predictions beat the experts’. The experts’ predictions weren’t even close.
Why? Experts have a lot invested in the theories they’ve developed to explain the world. And after a few years of working on them, they tend to see them everywhere. For example, bullish stock analysts banking on rosy financial scenarios were unable to identify the housing bubble that nearly bankrupted the economy—even though the trends that drove it were pretty clear to anyone looking. It’s not just that experts are vulnerable to confirmation bias—it’s that they’re
No schema is an island: Ideas in our heads are connected in networks and hierarchies.
Learning, then, is a balance. Jean Piaget, one of the major figures in developmental psychology, describes it as a process of assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation happens when children adapt objects to their existing cognitive structures—as when an infant identifies every object placed in the crib as something to suck on. Accommodation happens when we adjust our schemata to new information—“Ah, this isn’t something to suck on, it’s something to make a noise with!” We modify our schemata to fit the world and the world to fit our schemata, and it’s in properly balancing the two processes that growth occurs and knowledge is built.
The filter bubble tends to dramatically amplify confirmation bias—in a way, it’s designed to. Consuming information that conforms to our ideas of the world is easy and pleasurable; consuming information that challenges us to think in new ways or question our assumptions is frustrating and difficult. This is why partisans of one political stripe tend not to consume the media of another. As a result, an information environment built on click signals will favor content that supports our existing notions about the world over content that challenges them.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, for example, rumors swirled persistently that Barack Obama, a practicing Christian, was a follower of Islam. E-mails circulated to millions, offering “proof” of Obama’s “real” religion and reminding voters that Obama spent time in Indonesia and had the middle name Hussein. The Obama campaign fought back on television and encouraged its supporters to set the facts straight. But even a front-page scandal about his Christian priest, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was unable to puncture the mythology. Fifteen percent of Americans stubbornly held on to the idea that Obama was a Muslim.
That’s not so surprising—Americans have never been very well informed about our politicians. What’s perplexing is that since the election, the percentage of Americans who hold that belief has nearly doubled, and the increase, according to data collected by the Pew Charitable Trusts, has been greatest among people who are college educated. People with some college education were more likely in some cases to believe the story than people with none—a strange state of affairs.
Why? According to the
Which brings us to the second way the filter bubble can get in the way of learning: It can block what researcher Travis Proulx calls “meaning threats,” the confusing, unsettling occurrences that fuel our desire to understand and acquire new ideas.
Researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara asked subjects to read two modified versions of “The Country Doctor,” a strange, dreamlike short story by Franz Kafka. “A seriously ill man was waiting for me in a village ten miles distant,” begins the story. “A severe snowstorm filled the space between him and me.” The doctor has no horse, but when he goes to the stable, it’s warm and there’s a horsey scent. A belligerent groom hauls himself out of the muck and offers to help the doctor. The groom calls two horses and attempts to rape the doctor’s maid, while the doctor is whisked to the patient’s house in a snowy instant. And that’s just the beginning —the weirdness escalates. The story concludes with a series of non sequiturs and a cryptic aphorism: “Once one responds to a false alarm on the night bell, there’s no making it good again—not ever.”
The Kafka-inspired version of the story includes meaning threats—incomprehensible events that threaten readers’ expectations about the world and shake their confidence in their ability to understand. But the researchers also prepared another version of the story with a much more conventional narrative, complete with a happily- ever-after ending and appropriate, cartoony illustrations. The mysteries and odd occurrences are explained. After reading one version or the other, the study’s participants were asked to switch tasks and identify patterns in a set of numbers. The group that read the version adopted from Kafka did nearly twice as well—a dramatic increase in the ability to identify and acquire new patterns. “The key to our study is that our participants were surprised by the series of unexpected events, and they had no way to make sense of them,” Proulx wrote. “Hence, they strived to make sense of something else.”
For similar reasons, a filtered environment could have consequences for curiosity. According to psychologist George Lowenstein, curiosity is aroused when we’re presented with an “information gap.” It’s a sensation of deprivation: A present’s wrapping deprives us of the knowledge of what’s in it, and as a result we become curious about its contents. But to feel curiosity, we have to be conscious that something’s being hidden. Because the filter bubble hides things invisibly, we’re not as compelled to learn about what we don’t know.
As University of Virginia media studies professor and Google expert Siva Vaidhyanathan writes in “The Googlization of Everything”: “Learning is by definition an encounter with what you don’t know, what you haven’t thought of, what you couldn’t conceive, and what you never understood or entertained as possible. It’s an encounter with what’s other—even with otherness as such. The kind of filter that Google interposes between an Internet searcher and what a search yields shields the searcher from such radical encounters.” Personalization is about building an environment that consists entirely of the adjacent unknown—the sports trivia or political punctuation marks that don’t really shake our schemata but
Stripped of the surprise of unexpected events and associations, a perfectly filtered world would provoke less learning. And there’s another mental balance that personalization can upset: the balance between open- mindedness and focus that makes us creative.
