Gather ’round, boys and girls, and have a seat on the magic carpet. Today, your friendly Uncle Fat Nerd is going to tell you a story about confirmation bias!
Hey! Get your ass back here, you ungrateful brats!
Okay, so maybe it’s not the most scintillating of topics, but it’s one I’ve been thinking about lately, particularly as it pertains to the pursuit of health. While all of us understand that the primary way to find yourself no longer paying for two seats on your solo flight to Albuquerque is to put down the cheese and actually move around a bit, there is definitely no shortage of information out there about little tiny details that will throw off your weight loss or accelerate it like a chipmunk on crystal meth. Go ahead, type “weight loss tips” into Google, and I will promise you an avalanche of folksy wisdom, courtesy of every yahoo with a keyboard and a blog.
Stop pointing at me, and we’ll move on.
The existence of this information is not inherently the problem. It’s how, as a culture, we choose to evaluate it. You see, we all have our own opinions about the best way to see the scale needle tick downward. Some say carbs are your friends, others say they are the devil’s adipose tissue and will make you fat. Some say programs with prepackaged meals are wonderful, others claim that it’s a soy bombardment that will cause cancer, digestive issues, and low resale value on your home. Some say to do cardio to lose weight, some say weight training. Some say the Beatles are the best band of all time, and some people are content to be just so very, VERY wrong.
I’m derailing a bit, but you get the idea. So, when confronted with this cavalcade of contradictions, we foray bravely into the wilderness of the Web to seek answers. That’s good. But it’s a very rare person who can seek answers without already knowing what they want those answers to be. That’s bad. Without realizing it, we seek out only that information that confirms what we already believe. That, my increasingly slender friends, is confirmation bias.
Here’s an example. If I were to be obsessed with drinking coffee so many times per day that I bought a burro to carry my beans, the term that I would be most likely to google might be, “Why coffee is good for you” or something similar. I read the first few articles that come up, and come away confident that my view of the rich black blood of the earth as a necessary addition to my daily consumption has been validated. What I don’t do is google, “Health risks of too much coffee intake.” Why would I? I don’t want to find out that it’s bad for me; that would force me to reevaluate my behavior and, even more challenging, reevaluate my decision making process.
We’re all guilty of this. We don’t seek out information to learn the truth about the subject. We seek out information to validate and confirm what we already believe. It’s comforting to think we have all the answers, and it’s far too easy to settle into a cycle of taking an action, seeking out confirmation that action was correct, rinsing, and repeating. We see this in politics, but it pops up in the process of seeking out healthy behavior. Point of proof? How many people six months into the Atkins diet do you think will ever look for articles about the negative health effects of Atkins?
I bring this up simply for consideration. It’s not an easy habit to break. But when you look up information about your health, make a conscious effort to acknowledge the possibility that you might be wrong, and indeed, may have been wrong for a while now. Challenge yourself. If you genuinely are correct, you will come out of the process with a level of confirmation that is much more satisfying. If you are not, at least you’ve brought an end to potentially disruptive behavior.
Next week, we’ll discuss outliers and statistical variances in double-blind… I’m just kidding. We’ll be back to our usual, more low-brow, programming.
