In the
previous set of posts about the Ladder of Inference, we named Inattentional Blindness as our most recent cognitive bias of interest
[a.k.a. CranioRectal Inversion (CRI)]. The Invisible Gorilla
demonstrated for us that we don't take information in objectively,
and that focus and other factors in our environment can alter our
attention. You would think that someone would notice something as
absurd as a gorilla walking through a group of kids passing
basketballs back and forth, but 50% of people never see the gorilla
because of the divided attention task of counting passes.
CRI
#3: Bizarreness Effect
In
general, we tend to take more notice to things that stand out from
what we know as the norm, and I've been using just that to pique
interest in this bunch of posts. Aspects of it help us survive, and
can harness this very same effect – the Bizarreness Effect – to
achieve both helpful and harmful ends. It is an example of how our
attention is actually selective, but being aware of that fact can
help us make conscious choices which ultimately make life safer for
us. I also enjoy the humor value which will should already be
apparent.
While we
tend to take notice of more unusual examples than we do a baseline
norm in a given situation, we can also find that our internal
processes of thought tend to recall contrasts or bizarre examples
more readily. We can the consciously select those things which we
dwell on and how long we spend thinking about them.
CRI
#4: Anchoring Bias
In the
general sense in mental health, the term anchoring echoes the
function of a ship anchor which grabs the floor of a body of water to
fix it's position. By using humorous examples, I'm hopefully
creating anchors for memory and recall.
As a
cognitive bias, anchoring refers to the human tendency to more
readily recall the very first bit of information that we learn about
a subject. The protagonist in the cable series Dead Like Me offers
one of my favorite examples of this effect (along with some absurdity
that may help to anchor this concept in your memory). Georgia is a
young college dropout who dies after being struck by remnant debris
from the Mir space station as it broke up after reentering the
earth's atmosphere. Ironically, it's later determined that the
toilet seat claimed her life. She becomes a “grim reaper,” a
person who helps others transition into their own afterlife until she
meets her undisclosed quota of souls. To her “undead” peers who
work with her and even to the living, she becomes known as “toilet
seat girl.”
No
matter what she does and regardless of the rather impressive personal
growth she manifests after she becomes a grim reaper, people still
refer to her and recognize her best by the moniker which I'm sure
she'd be happy to shed. For us, it demonstrates how we can also get
locked into placing too much emphasis on our own anchors which may
lock us into static modes of thinking.
CRI
#5: Misinformation Effect
Much
like the Anchoring Bias, we tend to remember and recall the first
thing that we learn about a matter, and misinformation seems to be one
of those things that we have trouble shaking. Though we may learn
the correct info later, it seems that we human beings tend to favor
the misinformation over the fact. This contributes to how we focus
on misinformation that seems inconsistent with what we know about a
subject, grounding it in our minds, both as we notice it and as we
recall it later. The misinformation creates a bit of emotional drama
which we've already noted plays a major role in the tagging and
laying down of long term memory.
I
recently came across a discussion of an old report on a satire
website that deliberately distorted a statement that John Piper made
about gender reassignment. For anyone who knows much about my
history of writing and blogging about spiritual abuse, they'll likely
readily recall my challenges of errors in Piper's skewed theology.
The satirists extrapolated into what they thought Piper might say
about women who wax their body hair – and frankly – it wouldn't
shock me one bit if it were true. 
Piper who many consider a
“hyper-Calvinist” places what I consider to be an unhealthy
degree of emphasis on God's providence which he interprets as
theologic predestination or philosophic predeterminiism. Building
upon Piper's disturbingly disproportional focus on gender, the
website claimed falsely that he stated that women who wax “hurt
God's work.”
Snopes
reports the spoof website statement as false, but given that so
much that comes out of his camp is often shock-jock bombastic, it
makes for good humor. I think that with this bit of information, it
makes it that much more difficult to dismiss.
Related
Biases
In real
life, this cognitive bias demonstrates how important it is to
maintain peer review as well as checks on our own memory which is not
as reliable as we'd like to think. And as we saw in the
example of Jack Webb's Joe Friday, the misinformation effect
plays an important role in how witnesses to crimes can alter their
memories and how fragile they tend to be.
The
Bizarreness, Anchoring and Misinformation Effects also overlap with
other types of attention biases and salience biases (what we find to
be most distinct about a subject or person). They also share some
similarities with the Contrast Effect, too. And thanks to the humor,
these examples also involve the Continued Influence bias. I'm not
sure, but I think that different authors actually refer to Continued
Influence and Misinformation interchangeably.
Significant
Research
Related
to these issues of misinformation and anchoring as a fixed point of
orientation for later recall, if a person first encountered new
information or misinformation recently, they are more likely to pull
it out of their memory. So the significance does fade with time, but
this is very individualized and may never completely dissipate.
Our
human trait to use context clues to “fill in the gaps” in memory
or even to fill in gaps created by insufficient information. We see
this used as a coping mechanism for those who are experiencing
cognitive decline to hide and deny the painful experience of the loss
of attention ability and memory.
And
little measures have been found to effectively correct the
misinformation effect. Reminding people that sources of information
were unreliable doesn't make a significant difference, presenting and
arguing enticing alternatives doesn't affect much change in those who
embrace ideological types of beliefs (think religion and politics).
Direct opposition and argument yields little to no favorable change.
And those who tend toward particular outlets of unreliable
ideological information will tend to return to those sources,
regardless of attempts to persuade them otherwise.
For Further Reading:
- One of the $3 Kindle books about Cognitive Bias at Amazon.com
- Elizabeth Loftus' Memory: Surprising New Insights
- Gilovich, Griffin & Kahneman's Heuristics and Biases
- Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
- Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery
