Confirmation Bias

A while back I read the tragic story of First Air Flight 6560, a Boeing 737 that was flying into Resolute Bay, in the Canadian Arctic. This airport is at a point where the magnetic variation (the difference between true north (the northern rotational axis of the planet) and magnetic north (the northern rotational axis of the earth’s spinning iron core)) differ by close to 50 degrees. That’s a bunch.

So, the crew neglected to reset their compasses as they approached the airport (that’s bad). Then, when they overshot the runway and were trying to correct back, they had different visions of the problem. The First Officer correctly saw them as right of course and drifting farther right. The Captain perceived them as having overshot, but correcting back to course. (For a full explanation of the event, go here.)

The First Officer was correct, but the Captain couldn’t see it. He was suffering from confirmation bias, the tendency to see only data that agrees with your view of the world, and to reject/ignore other information. He just couldn’t accept what the other pilot was telling him because it didn’t make sense with his current world view.

They crashed. Everyone but three passengers died, and those three only survived because Canada happened to be staging an arctic rescue exercise in the vicinity and all the key players were nearby and on alert.

Thank God. Glad that’ll never happen to me. I’m way more savvy. Far more aware of cognitive biases like these. Not susceptible to this fallibility. I even ignored previous examples in my own life. Then today happened.

No one died. No one was hurt. My ego was bruised a bit, but here’s the deal: I was looking in an airport hangar for sharps containers – you know, those red boxes where junkies and diabetics throw away their hypodermics? I found none. Didn’t expect to. They are not required by law and not mentioned anywhere in this company’s manuals. Ergo, they would not be there.

Just in case, I walked through the hangar looking around. Nope. Nothing. Nada. Okay, just what I expected. A few hours later, I mentioned this to one of the Directors, who told me that I was wrong. There were sharps containers all over the hangar.

I mentally threw a BS flag. I’d have seen them.

Two more hours pass. I mention them to the facilities guy. “Oh, yeah, there’s some right over here.”

WTF? “Can you show them to me?”

“Sure.” He walked me straight to two of them. They were yellow. I had it set in my mind that they were always red. Therefore, anything yellow could not possibly be what I was looking for, so I could ignore them. Except I couldn’t.

I was a victim of confirmation bias. My own victim. So, how do you prevent yourself from making the same mistake?

My survey of the literature gives me the following major hint: Ask others.

I did. Why didn’t it work? Because I didn’t believe them. Someone had to prove me wrong. They had to lead me physically to the proof that I was wrong. Only then did the epiphany strike. Sharps containers don’t have to be red. 

Accept that you can be wrong, and open your mind to reality.