Our Biases (How They Guide Us)

By Kasun Kamaladasa –JUNE 5, 2019

Kasun Kamaladasa

Events that took place after the Easter bomb blasts may seem as counter intuitive/ intuitive/ rational/ irrational depending on a person’s belief. People who were killed while praying, prayed harder. Peoples traditions that seemed to instill fear on others seemed to be more strong in holding those traditions, People who spread hatred from shadows came out to spread it in broad daylight, Extremist supporters started believing in extremism even more than before, Political supporters started backing their political parties more than ever. I myself refortified my stance as a person who is strongly against institutionalized religion.

My reasons for writing this article isn’t to change those people who act with fear and prejudice, because most of them will never sit-down and read anything. This article is for those who wish to understand why we all can easily behave the same way, if we are unaware of our own biases. Especially in times we feel threatened, even knowing these biases might not be enough to guide ourselves to see clearly. However, knowing them and knowing the limitations of our primitive minds, could give us a slight hope in recovering and understanding.

Backfire effect

When our core beliefs are challenged, like God, Karma or Allah, we start believing in those even more blindly. When god allowed bombs to go out in his place of worship or when many generous and good people died tragically with no apparent Karma to deserve such a fate or how Allah would allow his name to be used to create such terror, each person of each religion would somehow justify these flaws. They will convince themselves of having a deeper understanding of their religion that no other-religious person would actually understand (only blind belief, conveniently hidden with the 2500-year-old claim “not everything can be proven”)

Sunken cost fallacy 

We all have those things that we don’t let go of, an old car, a broken down house, an ex, a depressing profession. Even though clinging on to these things cost us heavily, we cling on because of what it cost us to get to them in the first place.

That is the same reason why we hang on to our beliefs (religious or otherwise) even though sometimes we know they are bad for us, that they misguide us. We have spent our whole lives building our identity upon it, we have spent countless hours listening and learning scriptures, traditions, philosophies and narratives. We have “invested” in them. It’s not easy to let go.

Confirmation bias

When we hear a news story we agree with, we might search for the same story and we might come across many articles confirming our suspicion, erasing our doubts. But we only look for confirmation of the story, not the denials or evidence against it.

This is one of the hardest biases we encounter today. Probably, that is what politicians, astrologers and marketers use most to fool people. With the internet, the number of stories/campaigns have skyrocketed.

During the past few weeks, so many such stories were shared, a story about Putin telling Muslims to leave the country if they don’t accept “Russian traditions” (When the real story was complete opposite and Putin acknowledged the great contributions of Muslims towards Russia), a story about China being a peaceful country (Chinese people wrote the book titled Art of War, they have been involved in many wars and had rulers who killed more people than Hitler), a story about how Japanese not allowing Muslims to get Visa (again published in many Islam phobic sites but was found out to be false)  

Dunning-Kruger effect

Bertrand Rustle once said “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt”

No wonder people who have barley read a history book in their lives have come out as History experts explaining how Islamic States were formed invading other faiths, and how governments with religious ideologies were raised. There is lot to learn from world history. Not from a single book or a single teacher but from a multitude of them and we can understand that all religions (and groups that demanded loyalty and faith, like communist parties around the world) have done their part in violent acts if/when they had such power to do so.

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