Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Confirmation Bias

"Confirmation bias refers to a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and to look for what confirms one's beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts one's beliefs...A tendency to do this over time unjustifiably strengthens one's belief in the relationship between [a cause and an effect]."


No matter how smart some people are, they sometimes make the dumbest judgements. Why is this? It is a concept called confirmation bias. Due to genetic predisposition, educational background, parental influence, or general life experience people will tend to make decisions skewed towards the irrational even when faced with a straightforward table of "pro's" and "con's."

Take, for instance, at work today. My "Call of the Day" was a customer that had called in after their respective customer care department had closed. He wanted to dispute his bill, which (in most circumstances) can only be done through this department: Not the receivables management department, to which I belong.

He comes on the line and I introduce myself as I always do with my name, position, and department and a statement indicating why I understand they wanted to speak with me.

Of course, the customer needs to go into their issue, what they feel is background, for a while. He finally gets to the point after some minutes of speaking. I indicate to him that the previous representative was correct, and that he needed to speak with the customer care department, however they were closed at this time.

The customer, obviously not caring for that answer, asked the question again, phrased a different way.

"Sir, I cannot connect you with that department."

A third time he asked, again in a different way. This time he threw in there something about him recording the conversation, perhaps thinking that I was giving him wrong information.

"Sir, for the third time, I cannot directly connect you with our customer care department."

The definition of insanity is doing something over and over again, expecting different results. At this point the customer became very sarcastic (you know, more than he already was) and downright rude.

I advised him that I did not care for him being rude, reminding him to keep the conversation on a professional tone. I then asked if there were anything else I could address.

The call ended shortly thereafter. However, this is a common ocurrence in my business. I just think that...some of these people...at which point in time does their medula oblongata (brain stem, which controls basic bodily functions) say that the intelligence quotient is so low that it just stops working?

Come on, this tactic isn't even intelligent. It's the same kind of thing that 8 year-olds use when they are trying to get their ways. Surely, a lot of these people aren't having the same mental capacity as 8 year-olds.

Are they?

This is what leads me to confirmation bias. For some reason, due to some event that shaped this person's life during their past up to this point in time, they believe that a certain course of action will provoke different responses in a situation, especially after repeated attempts.

...Or do they need to be reminded with the smack to the head with the big newspaper and following with the stern "No!"


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