Consistency Bias

There is a really good book (and podcast) by David Macraney called “You Are Not So Smart”. It’s all about the way our brains fool us and how unreliable everything we think we know really is. One of the things he discusses is CONSISTENCY BIAS. Well, recently I have spent a lot of time reading through old wordcraft threads from the glory days when we had some fine knock-em-down, drag-em-through-the-dust discussions on all sorts of topics. I have found myself on more occasions than are comfortable reading things I posted and thinking, “What? Did I really say that. I don’t believe it. I don’t think that at all.” Was I really so scathing about The Turner Prize not being art, for example, when I now believe that (and I am quoting myself) “It’s art if the artist says it is and beyond that we are discussing the entirely different question of whether it is good or bad art.” Did I really get all prescriptivist and pernickety about apostrophes, the difference between infer and imply, people using enormity to mean size not wickedness and so on?

Here’s the thing though. If you had asked me a week ago - before I started to read all those old threads - I would have sworn that the views I hold now are broadly the same views that I have always held. But they are certainly not the views that I was sometimes expressing here. This is what David Macraney calls “Consistency Bias”. By that he means the unwillingness that we have to admit that our views have changed. Perhaps “unwillingness” is the wrong word as it isn’t just an involuntary process, it’s an automatic one. A couple of brief quotes from the book might clarify the meaning.

“You need to feel that you can predict your own behaviour and so you sometimes rewrite your own history so you can seem dependable to yourself.”

“If you are madly in love now, but once had your doubts, you simply delete the past and replace it with one less inconsistent with your present state.”

He cites research (1986, Hazel Markus) where in 1965, 1973 and 1982 the same group of people were asked questions about their political opinions. That the opinions changed over time is unremarkable but only about 30% accurately recalled their earlier answers and the rest tended to believe that the newer opinions were the ones they had always had.

If you have been posting on wordcraft for a long time it’s an interesting exercise to see if, and how, your views have changed and if there are things you said then that you definitely wouldn’t say now.

The Misinformation Effect

I was at my aunt’s funeral. I was sitting next to my brother while the funeral service was taking place. As is the custom the minister had spoken with my Aunt’s sons some time before the service to gather information for the eulogy. There came a point where she chose to tell a tale about her that illustrated what a kind and warm-hearted person she had been. (She definitely was.) The tale was this. One of her children (our cousins) had won a goldfish at the fairground and put it into a glass bowl at home. One morning she came into the room to find the goldfish floating on the surface. Quickly she picked up a drinking straw and used it to blow gently into the fish’s mouth, managing by this “kiss of life” to revive it.
It is, I think you will agree, an odd tale.
What made it odder though was that as it unfolded I stared at my brother and he at me in total disbelief. This was a tale we both knew but not told of our Aunt, told of our Mother. Hell, I remembered being there and seeing her do it.
Talking afterwards to our cousins they were one hundred percent sure it was their mother. One of them remembered seeing it as clearly as I did.
What was going on? It was monumentally unlikely that we could all be right. It was an unlikely story for even one person to have done it but for both? Unthinkable.
We never resolved it. We never figured out which, if either, of our mothers, had performed this miracle.
The best I can figure is that maybe one of them did it and then the other one told the tale and we (either me and my brother or our cousins) incorporated into our memories as having been our mother.

Memory is not reliable. In his book Macraney discusses how easy it is to alter someone’s memories - either someone else’s or your own - via the Misinformation Effect. He cites many different experiments that have confirmed how easily our memories can be altered and shaped. In one adults were convinced that they had met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland by showing them fake advertising showing a child doing just that despite the fact that Bugs isn’t even a Disney character. This is why it’s so inadvisable in criminal cases to rely solely (or even at all) on eye-witness testimony. We don’t, so the theory goes, store all those memories like a video library, instead we reconstruct them on the fly when we try to recall them and they are subject to all kinds of influences from our mental state as we recall them, our surroundings, things we have said and done since the last time we recalled the “same” memory.

Change Blindness/ Inattentional Blindness

Two for the price of one today. Change Blindness and Inattentional Blindness are separate but similar phenomena relating to how we see the world around us. Some of you may be familiar with some of the videos I will mention below but if you aren’t I apologise because once you have read this you won’t be able to watch them in the state of mind that is necessary. We can try though. The videos in question can be found at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3iPrBrGSJM

Watch them now. You may not get the best from them but we can try.

NOW READ ON

I first saw the basketball video at a training day from my college and I swear that I did not, on the first play, notice the gorilla at all. About two thirds of the hundred or so people present didn’t see the gorilla. Just in case you didn’t watch and have never seen it I’ll describe it briefly. Two groups of people - one group in white shirts, the other in black - toss around a basketball while you try to count the number of passes. What many of the viewers completely miss, and this is hard to believe unless it happened to you, is that part of the way through someone dressed as gorilla walks across the court, turns and looks at the camera and then walks off. The effect is so striking that, if you didn’t see the gorilla then when you are shown the video again you would bet serious money that it is not the same video as the first time. This is called Inattentional Blindness. You are concentrating so hard on one thing that you completely miss something that ought to stand out. It’s a light-hearted experiment but it has serious consequences. It causes a lot of car accidents. People aren’t lying when they say they didn’t see the car or the cyclist that they hit. They genuinely didn’t. It may have reached their eyes but it didn’t reach their brain. They saw the part of the scene they wer focussed on and missed something else they should have seen.

Change blindness is similar. In the second video a man performs a card trick. It’s a spectacularly poor card trick but that’s not the point. During the trick various aspects of the scene change - the table cloth, the colour of the backdrop and both presenters shirts. Most people on one viewing don’t catch any of it. I knew what was going on and still missed the table cloth. A famous version of this experiment had a hotel receptionist part way through registering someone replaced by a completely different person and most of the people he was talking to f ailed to notice the substitution at all. This is called Change Blindness. Our brains form a general picture of what is happening around us but only really go into details when the detail is immediately relevant. Details that are not especially relevant are not noticed so that those details can change quite significantly and the changes don’t register at all.


Incidentally I assume you saw the gorilla. Not the one in the basketball video - the one in the card trick video.

You know, I have seen or heard about this before, and still I missed the gorilla. This reminds me some of two types of meditation. One involves concentrating on one thing. The other involves being open to everything. The latter has been called by different names in different sects of Buddhism. In Zen, it is known as shikantaza or "just sitting". Counting the passes among the white shirts involved focusing the mind on one thing. I think if the instructions had been to just try to be open to all that one saw on the video, it would have garnered better results in seeing the gorilla.

In the second video, I noticed the backdrop at the end. I noticed the color. I couldn't have told you that the color had changed, but I was suddenly aware of it. Again, I was focusing on the cards and didn't notice all the other changes taking place. To me, this means that selecting a focus leads to missing other parts of what is going on around us. Both seem important to have and both have their limits. I could not have counted the passes, which I found hard enough to do, anyway, without focusing the mind on the white shirts and the ball. Perhaps, I noticed the change in the backdrop at the end of the card trick because it was at the end, and/or because it was such a dramatic change.

By the way, there is also focusing the mind on a single object in meditation. It can be breaths. Counting them is often used. Mantras are used in Tibetan Buddhism. The koan (ko ahn) used in Zen involves focusing on a sort of riddle that can't be discovered using the intellect.

The Anchoring Effect

I’m going to paraphrase here and you will have to forgive me if my examples are not as good as David Macraney’s but I don’t want to quote too much of his book. The best way to explain the Anchoring Effect is to try to demonstrate it. Because I’m making up my own examples it might not work very well but we’ll give it a shot.

First of all, try answering this question.

I did some googling to find the most expensive wedding dress (just for this post,you understand - there is no personal news that I need to tell you). Here’s the question.

Do you think the most expensive I could find was more or less than five million dollars? Take a minute to think about it. Write your answer down.

Done it? Well here’s another question. Just how expensive do you actually think it was? Write down a number.

OK. Let’s proceed. Before I give you the answer let me describe what the Anchoring Effect is. When people are first given a suggested number - as I just did with question one there is a tendency to be influenced by that figure. I could just as easily have said is it higher or lower than two million or ten million. You might think that your guess is based on something else but really it based on the number that I gave you. When you come to answer question number two question number one is still interfering with your judgement, anchoring you to a certain range. Experiments have found that in questions like these the higher the “anchor” - the initial suggestion - is the higher peoples “free” guess on the second question will be.

The answer to the question is that the highest priced dress that I found was an eye-watering thirty million dollars but studies suggest that most of you will have given an answer substantially closer to my figure of five million. Had I said fifteen million you would probably have made your free guess much higher.

I don’t know if that is what will happen here but certainly with comparable questions in “You Are Not So Smart” it worked with me.