Using Confirmation Bias to Lie, Deceive, and Persuade
Confirmation Bias Part 3: How self-deception keeps the con going
In Part 1 we covered the history and mechanics of confirmation bias and in Part 2 we saw how it signals tribal loyalty and projects unearned confidence. Now, in Part 3: how self-deception makes us better liars, and why our brains may have evolved less for uncovering truth than for winning the argument.
Confirmation bias as a means of self-deception
So if grandstanding loyalty and confidence are winning tactics, what’s the best policy for staying in character? Integrity has already been compromised with confirmation bias, so why not jump all the way in with some self-deception?
In their 2011 paper The Evolution and Psychology of Self-Deception1, William von Hippel and Robert Trivers argue that self-deception solves a handful of problems at once:
First, it makes you a better liar. It’s hard to give off liar vibes if you don’t really think you are one. Sketchy tics, microexpressions, stammering – all those leaky tells disappear when you believe your own bullshit. As the authors put it,
Self-deception evolved to facilitate interpersonal deception by allowing people to avoid the cues to conscious deception that might reveal deceptive intent.
Second, it reduces cognitive load. Remember the lazy brain concept from the Dual-Process article? Our brains love automaticity and effortlessness. But maintaining a lie means keeping track of who knows what, updating an inventory of all the little details, monitoring your own behavior for inconsistencies, and so on. By fully surrendering to the delusion one can drift around on autopilot, bullshit in tow. Again, the authors:
Self-deception eliminates the costly cognitive load that is typically associated with deceiving.
Third, it creates plausible deniability. It’s better to be accused of accidental misinformation than malicious bullshitting.
Since the person is not being intentionally deceitful, there is less risk of retaliation for misrepresentation. Liars are punished more than the mistaken.
Finally, it can make you feel better about yourself. A 2004 study looked at how we handle uncontrollable events, using a dating game scenario. Subjects made to believe they were likely to be chosen for a date spent more time looking at positive information about the potential partner. When led to believe they were unlikely to be chosen by that person, they spent more time looking at negative information about the tasteless prick.2
Another study shows how we go out of our way to avoid learning unpleasant things about ourselves, even if it leaves us less informed. When subjects were given a saliva test for a (unbeknownst to them, fictional) disease, they spent about 40% less time scrutinizing the test strip results if they were told a color change indicated a bad outcome, as opposed to a good one.3
Now, back to my MAGA-ed mom. I refuse to believe she’s incapable of comprehending basic information that undermines her delusions. She demonstrates complex logic and problem solving in other domains. But she’s settled in an ecosystem of media that feeds her with a steady stream of confirmatory evidence. Von Hippel and Trivers coincidentally use Mom-approved Fox News as an exemplar of selective information gathering:
People can be relatively confident that the brunt of the information they gather will be consistent with their worldview, even if they do not know what tomorrow’s headlines will bring.
In other words, her environment does the confirmation for her, and self-deception does the rest. She just needs to show up to church on Sunday, check Facebook from time to time, and turn on the television – no additional work required. Mom doesn’t have to constantly decide to believe that immigrants are destroying America. She’s just told that repeatedly, so she gets to feel like an honest person the whole time. Scrutinizing such things would come at a great cost: it could jeopardize her relationship with God, her friends, her identity, and the sense that she’s been right all along. So why would she bother?
Confirmation bias as a persuasion optimizer
Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (20114 and 20175) argue that the function of rationality, at least in social contexts, isn’t to be correct – it’s to “devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade.” In this sense, participating in confirmation bias is no different than a methodical lawyer preparing to convince an uncertain jury. Our brains do two things really well, they say:
Generating reasons that justify what we believe or how we’ve behaved
Finding faults in arguments that clash with our theses
Our most cringeworthy moments of cognitive bias appear, they say, when people are doing solitary tasks, stripped of any social or persuasive relevance. Consider the following 1966 experiment by P.C. Wason, in another canonical study of confirmation bias, the four-card task.6
If you want to try this one yourself, click the button below (again, it links out to a GitHub page with an interactive widget). If not, just read on for the explanation.
In this experiment subjects are asked to verify a card-gamified version of the statement “If P, then Q”. Like in the 2-4-6 task, subjects consistently sought confirmation rather than falsification, failing accordingly. Only about 10% of people get this one correct on their own… but that jumps to around 80% when repeated in a group setting.7
So, groups of humans can actually be more rational than the sum of their parts. A 2021 meta-analysis of 22 studies involving over 5,000 individuals confirmed that “collective intelligence” is a robust, measurable phenomenon.8 When it comes to such studies, Mercier and Sperber note that,
In many cases, no single participant had the correct answer to begin with. Several participants may be partly wrong and partly right, but the group will collectively be able to retain only the correct parts and thus converge on the right answer. This leads to the assembly bonus effect, in which the performance of the group is better than that of its best member.9
Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind (2012), makes a similar argument, comparing individual humans to neurons (dumb on their own), but groups of humans to brains (capable of amazing rationality).
If you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.10
So, is this the silver lining to all of this mess? Is my MAGA-ed mom an unwitting node in some greater good that I’m just not seeing? Is MAGA some virtuous emergent property of a bunch of gullible, proudly ignorant Fox News fans, ushering us into a new era of enlightenment? No, definitely not. After all, Nazis were a group of folks with a “common bond and shared fate”, and they got together and reasoned themselves up a Holocaust.
The optimism here has two worrisome preconditions that Haidt was careful to include: civility and openness to disconfirmation. When it comes to civility, the entire MAGA brand is built on trolling the libs, owning the cucks, salivating at cruelty. A dickish “You’re fired!” was the original catchphrase, the public humiliation irresistible to early fans.
As for disconfirmation, any disagreement with Trump is apostasy, earning one exile, criminal indictment, or at the very least a childish nickname. Which leads us to the secret behind every invincible MAGA delusion, an old but effective trick: the inability to be disproven. More on that in Part 4.
Series Table of Contents:
✓ Part 1: Inconvenient Truths and the Mechanics of Being Sure (My MAGA-ed Mom and a history of confirmation bias)
✓ Part 2: Tribal Loyalty and Con(fidence) Artistry (The naive view of information and two ways confirmation bias secures your seat at the table)
✓ Part 3: Self-Deception and the Argumentative Mind (Deep delusion and our instinct to persuade) ← [YOU ARE HERE]
○ Part 4: Unfalsifiable Bullshit and Moral Obligations (MAGA’s invincibility cheat code and the danger of thoughtlessness)
William von Hippel and Robert Trivers, "The Evolution and Psychology of Self-Deception," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34, no. 1 (2011): 1–56.
Timothy Wilson, Thalia Wheatley, Jamie Kurtz, Elizabeth Dunn, and Daniel Gilbert, "When to Fire: Anticipatory Versus Post-Event Reconstrual of Uncontrollable Events," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30, no. 3 (2004): 340–351.
Peter Ditto and David Lopez, "Motivated Skepticism: Use of Differential Decision Criteria for Preferred and Nonpreferred Conclusions," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 63, no. 4 (1992): 568–584.
Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, "Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34, no. 2 (2011): 57–74.
Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, The Enigma of Reason. Harvard University Press, 2017.
P.C. Wason, "Reasoning," in New Horizons in Psychology, ed. Brian Foss, 135–151. Penguin, 1966. See also: P.C. Wason, "Reasoning About a Rule," Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 20, no. 3 (1968): 273–281.
David Moshman and Molly Geil, "Collaborative Reasoning: Evidence for Collective Rationality," Thinking and Reasoning 4, no. 3 (1998): 231–248.
Christoph Riedl, Young Ji Kim, Pranav Gupta, Thomas Malone, and Anita Williams Woolley, "Quantifying Collective Intelligence in Human Groups," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 21 (2021).
Patrick Laughlin, Bryan Bonner, and Andrew Miner, "Groups Perform Better Than the Best Individuals on Letters-to-Numbers Problems," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 88, no. 2 (2002): 605–620.
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon, 2012.