Confirmation bias can keep you stuck

We are all biased. We feel different about ourselves versus others. We can spot fault in those around us but we become blind when it comes to self-critique.

This is very clear when I am working with a struggling employee. It seems like they cannot accept the fact that their individual performance is poor. They come up with every reason they can think of why it is someone or something else’s fault. This prevents them from being able to take steps to improve.

In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, author Jonathan Haidt talks about this confirmation bias.

He says, “Watson called this phenomenon the confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out and interpret new evidence in ways that confirm what you already think. People are quite good at challenging statements made by other people, but if it’s your belief, then it’s your possession – your child, almost – and you want to protect it, not challenge it and risk losing it.”

This blocks self-improvement. If you can’t see what is wrong, how can you fix it? Instead you spend your energy trying to justify it.

When you let your guard down and allow yourself to be wrong, you open yourself up to new areas of improvement. Instead of digging in to prove yourself right, you question your beliefs. You become open to change them if appropriate.

Some people are better at this than others. The people that I have worked with who seem to be able to improve, all seem to be open to criticism.

This doesn’t mean they blindly agree with any disagreeing party. It means they don’t jump to the assumption that they are right. They pause before responding. They take in the information and ask, “is it possible that this is true?”

Once you do this a few times and learn how to use constructive criticism to improve, you start to become confident in your ability to change. This allows you to lower your guard and let that information come through. You stop putting your effort into challenging others. Instead, you work to improve yourself.

Self-improvement is possible. But many of the natural ways that humans think and respond to the world prevent us from taking full advantage of this.

If we can reduce our confirmation bias and learn to challenge our own beliefs, we can start to grow and improve. We can get better. We can overcome many of the self-imposed obstacles in life. Then we can learn to live by constantly getting better over time.