Clustering Illusion & Confirmation Bias
The human brain is designed in such a way that it always seeks for patterns from experiences. We forget or deliberately ignore the fact that the event, which happened in the past, was once a first. And we are so desperate in finding patterns and rules that when we don’t find any familiar pattern, we just invent one.
Scientists call this Illusory Pattern Perception or Clustering Illusion.
They tried to find out why we think in such a way. This is mainly because humans do not like to feel that they do not have any command on their own fate. By inventing patterns, they offer themselves a sense of self-control.
You do not have to go far to look for example. Have you not seen faces of animals or girls or any other familiar shapes in the clouds? While finding shapes in clouds was not harmful, this pattern recognition trait is particularly harmful when it comes to earning our livelihood i.e., in business. In the stock market, we always look at the past data and invest based on them. In a business, the sales, marketing and finance people always try to draw conclusions based on the historical information. The demand planners try to estimate the sales based on the experience of activities. We ignore the fact that there must have been some changes; at least the time has changed and so is the preference of people.
Should we ignore our experience then and work based on our gut feelings only?
The answer is of course “not”. We cannot ignore our learnings because if we did so, the human kind would not be the most intelligent creature in the earth. The problem is our intention to discover a particular pattern. We look for data or events, which only corroborates the pattern, and help us to establish our objective. Consciously or sub-consciously, we tend to ignore the information that does not substantiate our intended pattern. This is called Confirmation Bias or Myside Bias - testing hypotheses in a one-sided way, by searching for evidence consistent with current hypothesis.
This is where Integrity comes to play. We have to keep in mind that when it comes to pattern recognition we are oversensitive. Any event may be similar to any previous event but they will never be the same. If there is no change internally, there has to be some changes externally. This trait is in our gene that we cannot ignore but can control. We have to be skeptical for the patterns and trends. We should look for information that proves the pattern wrong just to avoid the confirmation bias deeply en-rooted in us.