In General: Cardfirmation Bias

Hello Zoners, Grandpa here. Welcome to another In General, where we discuss top level strategy, game theory, developing your skills, what makes good cards good, the Commander metagame, and apparently now social psychology.

That's right, today is the first of many articles where I will be talking about Magic, Strategy, NOPE! Psychology. Joke is on you. Or your brain, rather. This is because we are going to examine a cognitive bias and how it can affect your play. A cognitive bias is a trick that your brain plays on you. It secretly urges you to make illogical decisions, view situations inaccurately, and collect/process information poorly.

Don't expect this is be a full blown master's course in social psych. I encourage you to continue your education. Knowing yourself and knowing others will make you better in all aspects of your life. This game isn't just cards and strategy; your mind takes center stage and you have to keep it sharp. If you let yourself fall into these traps then it will definitely cost you games. There are many of them, in fact here is a list: ShaB00M! Some of these may not apply to you, sometimes you might be in denial.

Confirmation Bias

What it is: The overvaluing of information which reinforces your view point. It causes you to dismiss or ignore information that disagrees with your established beliefs. This can manifest in several ways, some important ones are:

• Selective Memory - Subconsciously, you retain certain information and memories while discarding others. In this case, we are talking about remembering evidence that supported your opinion, but not the counter-evidence. Ex: you remember that you won three die rolls in a row tonight, but don't remember that you actually lost more than you won. Resulting in the belief that you are the Roll Master. (A name by which my roommate actually calls me because he incorrectly believes I win more die rolls than him)
• Biased Searching - You go looking for information with a preexisting agenda. You go looking for articles/advice that support you, so it isn't surprising that you find a lot of information that you agree with.
• Observational Selection - You don't pay much attention, but suddenly now you start seeing something everywhere. Cell phone towers, for example. Normally, not a subject of much concern, but if you start looking for them you will find they are everywhere. This bias suggests that they are showing up more now than before, like they are multiplying. It is important to note that this simply isn't the case. The government has always been watching you, duh.
• Mis-association - Sometimes, in pursuit of defending your entrenched beliefs you will wrongly perceive a connection between events or fail to observe a connection which does actually exist. This happens all the time in personal relationships: one party feels blameless and doesn't understand how their actions affect the other person. When confronted about it, this person will dismiss the other as being 'crazy' or 'overreacting' thus further vindicating their own viewpoint while alienating all others. Note that the related problem of association verse causation definitely falls into this category. 

Illustrating Examples
Let's look at some samples of how confirmation bias can hurt your game:

• There is a certain creature that you hate seeing. You are tired of losing to it. In your mind it seems like every time this thing comes out you lose. This creature, this Shmimeval Titan let's call it, is unstoppable, right? I mean, you always seem to lose to it, so it must be too good. What's really happening is that you are being handed piles of evidence saying that you need more answers in your deck, but all you can hear is: Shmimeval Titan is overpowered. When faced with controverting notions, you interpret it has reinforcing your point instead of detracting from it.
• Let's say you play a lot of casual games. You are the master of the kitchen table. It feels like you win 70-80% of your games. Your deck is so good, right? So you go to post it online and these vultures on the forums rip it to shreds. You try to explain to them that you have a crazy high win rate, but they don't seem to get how awesome you are. Eventually, you just write them off. They aren't good enough to understand why you are successful. Maybe they are trolling super hard. Perhaps it is just the typically critical nature of anonymous commenting; they wouldn't be able to deny you in person. Here, you are receiving feedback that you had skewed results. Either, you haven't been keeping accurate accounting of your wins and losses or you are playing against statistically inferior competition. Because of your cognitive bias however, you will not see any of the underlying factors that happen to be very relevant to your view: Strength of competition, relative play skill, match up considerations, individual players' expectations for game play (i.e. the vagaries in the 'spirit of the format'), luck...these factors differ vastly across playgroups and severely affect the outcome of games. Knowing exactly what factors contribute to a win can be difficult, but be sure to keep an open mind. Third party feedback has the innate advantage of NOT being subject to your biases.

I hope you enjoyed this article. I hope even more so that you you were able to take something positive away from it. Self-improvement is core to the human experience. It drives us. Often though, we must look inward for the solutions to our problems. The mind is a powerful and necessary tool, but it is also the source of nearly all of our struggles. Educating ourselves about these pitfalls will help us correct them and even avoid them in the future.

If this wasn't exactly your cup of tea, fear not. I will be doing at least another one of these in the future, but for next week I am going to be talking about some Pauper shenanigans and new cards from Theros!

-GG