Confirmation Bias

“the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of ones existing beliefs or theories”

Confirmation bias occurs from the direct influence of desires or beliefs, when people or groups want a certain idea or concept to be true, they gather data that supports these beliefs and reject or ignore information that can over shadow this belief.

A pro-campaigner of anything will highlight all of the positive evidence whilst an anti-campaigner will show/use the negative evidence and within an industry with so many options and opinions where does the evidence sit and what does it show

This can apply to published research as well; “bias can occur in the planning, data collection, analysis and publication phases of research, understanding research bias allows readers to critically and independently review scientific literature” – taken from “Identifying and Avoiding Bias in Research” Pannucci et al 2010

This probably seems like a lot of waffling on so far with very little point but at a base level and within our industry of fitness, there may be more options than the one that works for you or me.

I.e. Which diet works best? What style of workout or exercise gives you the best results? Which piece of CV burns the most calories? What class provides the most revenue or member retention?

Most of the choices we make are the ones that worked for us, we have cherry picked the data, we haven’t seen or tested all of the variables. Maybe we haven’t looked to dis-prove an idea or hypothesis (science lingo). Within scientific literature studies’ showing a positive result against their hypotheses adds weight to the concept or idea, whilst a negative result will disprove an idea or concept and actually allows further exploration of the reasons around the result.

This is a little video I found on YouTube which runs through an example of cherry picking and confirmation bias, its not in HD or overly difficult to understand just thought provoking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpvPj1i8h6c

As an industry I do feel we have to be more critical in the way we think about solutions and innovations, even scientific literature will show what they want you to see. It’s normally the unexpected result; results which go against the hypothesis which are the most intriguing.