Confirmation Bias and Naïve Realism – learning from a LinkedIn Post

A few days ago, I posted what I thought was a straightforward message. To me the message was about remembering the fallen who sacrificed their lives to keep a nation safe. I contrasted this with people in uniform being beaten, in public, in a protest in Delhi. I loosely referred to the event as a questionable protest; the focus being the treatment of people in uniform.

Surprisingly most respondents to my post (members of LinkedIn) focused on the ‘belittling’ of the protest. I was told I was Naïve, had a different ideology, was insensitive to students and basically someone who was irresponsible. My first reaction was astonishment. The protest was but one event I referred to. My post had 3 dates in them which were completely ignored. I posted a clarification a week later but as is the policy of most, it was a shoot and scoot affair.

One particular respondent who had worked with me for close to a decade brought in the angle of my ideology. I read the comment. Then I read the post and then I read the comment again.

I simply didn’t get it.

If my ideology is to respect my fellow citizens who don a uniform to protect me, then yes, I get that.

If my ideology is about remembering the sacrifices that so many made so that I could be born free, then yes, I get it.

This entire sequence made me research the reasons why a post could receive such distorted and diverse interpretations. And I stumbled on to two terms Confirmation Bias and Naïve Realism.

Confirmation Bias is simply the LLM of the mind producing the bias it was trained on. A mind trained in a particular way chooses to focus on what aligns positively or negatively from one’s own acceptable way of thinking. The processing ignores all that needs focused interpretation, not because it is trained wrong, it is simply easier not to do so. The focus remains on that which is easier to process and simpler to respond to.

Naïve Realism is more complicated. It talks about the world view a mind has. We are so many individuals that it is impossible to standardize responses or even agree on reality based on a standard set of rules. “Free will” is loosely used to describe the reality a mind perceives. It is akin to the mentally disturbed who have a world view contrary to majority reality. There is thus a thin line trying to distinguish what is and what isn’t.

This understanding threw up a few clear paths for me to follow. One of them is what most politicians, news anchors, debate participants follow – ignore every adverse reaction. This is based on their years of conditioning and the willingness to believe that riding the tiger was the only option. The second to my mind is the path of defending positions one takes. In research there is a degree of defensibility built into it. The researcher is expected to defend her position. The contrast though is – the adversary is a peer with a different path or a different result but still based on an agreed set of rules. LinkedIn members, their posts, their views and their conclusions don’t follow any known pattern or accepted set. A classic example is the contrast in the number of posts on the student protest in Jharkhand. There is clearly a lot less being said about that protest when compared to the one in Delhi. I wonder where the ‘activists’ disappeared…

The important point is – what is the lesson in this for me?

The answer I found staring back at me was, less is more. I don’t have a business to run that is completely dependent on my public persona. I don’t have a point to prove to anyone including myself. I don’t need to lower the threshold of professionalism simply because the person in front of me does. My blog is probably a better platform on what works for me. There may or may not be enough who read it. But writing helps declutter the mind and get rid of thoughts that live rent free.

Perhaps this is the lesson I had learnt but needed a refresher course on and this is the lesson that must guide my behavior the way forward.