Cognitive Bias in the Time of the Virus
Cognitive Bias is rampant at the best of times. In the worst of times it becomes a pandemic.
Cognitive bias reflects that fact that human beings are storytellers rather than rational creatures. We collect and attend to the information that supports our views and opinions and ignore or reject anything that conflicts with it. This confirmation bias allows us a comfortable consistency in our narratives and beliefs eliminating the need to think deeply, or even at all, about our views and opinions. Critical thinking is very difficult, and takes a lot of work not to mention courage and humility, to seriously entertain opposing viewpoints. Which is why some people refuse to talk to others about religion or politics – or the coronavirus.
For a while now, the media seem to have decided to promote specific viewpoints, rather than provide comprehensive coverage that includes the spectrum of opinion – and associated facts. And social media allows pretty much anyone to share and promote their views without any attempt at putting them in context or evaluating them objectively.
As a result, cognitive bias is running rampant and will continue to do so. One of the biases that is already emerging is the hindsight bias. Of course, we can all be correct in our predictions once the future becomes the present. However, there is a tremendous tendency to look back in egotistical glory at your predictive capabilities once you know the outcome. News outlets who are blaming officials for not seeing the coronavirus outbreak earlier are engaging in hindsight bias. Were any of the media, who have massive contacts in many different disciplines, warning of the virus weeks before it became obvious what was happening? In retrospect, any previous action can be criticized if you want to, because we’re humans and we don’t know everything, and are overly influenced by the present. This emphasizes the idea that facts are probabilities, often unknown, and changing, probabilities.
The default setting of the human mind is also to mistakenly associate events that happen in fairly close proximity to each other. This is the basis of many conspiracy theories. Not only are those ideas associated, they are seen as causal. So 5G was being rolled out in Wuhan at the time of the virus and hey presto, 5G is the cause of the virus. This false association bias has run rampant recently associating, for example, the resignation of various executives at leading multinational companies as being a sign that these people knew the virus was coming.
What about the future? The Normalcy Bias will drive some people to believe that everything will soon be back to normal, while the Pessimism bias will have others believing that the world as we know it is over.
Unfortunately, binary thinking is also a default cognitive setting that eliminates productive discussion and critical thinking. The world is complex. For example, some people are spouting the news that coronavirus deaths are over-reported because almost every death is deemed due to the coronavirus, while others say that is under-reported because there aren’t enough tests to waste on someone who has already passed. The answer almost certainly is that some deaths are wrongly reported to be due to the coronavirus, while others are not being accurately counted as Co-vid 19 deaths. How many of each? We need data on that.
In my book I Think Therefore I Am Wrong: A Gide to Bias, Political Correctness, Fake News and the Future of Mankind I discuss these default settings of the mind, the numerous biases, how we can overcome them, and the need to understand how influential they are especially in matters of grave importance. (No, I didn’t know the virus was coming when I published the book last Fall.) The ebook version is free until April 13 if you’re interested.
You can get your free kindle version here: https://amzn.to/2Gyp8ti