What did that poster say on Fox Mulder’s wall? “I want to believe.” This was a canny bit of ironic deflection by The X Files’ creators. The more gullible of the two paranormal investigators was tacitly admitting to confirmation bias. The many-headed dung creatures of Thorg were pushing at an open door. I thought of this while considering the story, much promulgated during the Brexit debate this week, about that Welsh woman on that bus.
A man called Tom Bradbury, writing on Facebook, told us: “The most perfect thing I have ever seen just happened on the replacement train bus service between Newport and Cwmbran.” It seems that a woman in a niqab sat somewhere near him. She had been talking to her son for a while when a “white man” leaned in to interrupt. “When you’re in the UK you should really be speaking English,” he said.
Have you worked it out yet? Can you see the punchline coming?
An old woman turned to our antagonist and explained: “She’s in Wales. And she’s speaking Welsh.”
Ha ha! That’s you told, Mr Archetypically Ignorant Bigot.
The woman in traditional Muslim dress turns out to be more connected to Welsh culture than you are. “Perfect!” Tom remarked.
Well, yes. Just a little too perfect.
The story went viral and was picked up by respectable news sources such as the Times, the Huffington Post and the BBC. Then some terrible spoilsports began picking away at the facts.
The impeccably liberal New Statesman reminded us that variations on this story have been circulating for years. One particularly common version has Mr Archetypically Ignorant Bigot (US version) accosting a woman in a queue and saying: “If you want to speak Mexican go back to Mexico. In America we speak English.” She replies: “I was speaking Navajo. If you want to speak English go back to England.”
Meanwhile, one Michael Story was contacting the rail companies in Wales. It seems that no replacement bus was running on the day the incident was supposed to have happened.
It is still possible that the story is true, but the enthusiastic acceptance of a severely shaky anecdote demonstrates the way that confirmation bias skews objective interpretation of passing data. Readers’ attitudes to such anecdotes can say more about their political and social beliefs than their engagement with the facts. Here is an anecdote that supports a left-wing, progressive stance. If you believe it you are one of the good people. If you question it you are some sort of bottom-feeding Faragist.
Those inclined to believe competing myths treat right-wing fantasies about “scrounging refugees” in similar fashion.
This is the point at which we bow to journalistic strictures and introduce Donald Trump into the story. You may not like it. But it's the law.
At the start of this year, in his characteristically intemperate style, Trump commented on two stories that appeared to involve immigrants. After a shooting at a Paris police station and revelations about women being assaulted in Cologne he tweeted: “Man shot inside Paris police station. Just announced that terror threat is at highest level. Germany is a total mess-big crime. GET SMART!”
What happened next offered a scarcely improvable demonstration of the modern disease at its most vigorous and unstoppable. People who didn’t like Trump (join the queue) looked at the tweet and decided that it implied that Queens’s fiercest ape thought Paris was in Germany. The story fast became liberal orthodoxy. A report in the Daily Mirror appeared beneath the headline “Donald Trump thinks Paris is in Germany and everyone on the internet is laughing at him”. Sure enough, a quick search revealed that virtually every person commenting on the tweet bought the now-established line.
Having nothing better to do that day I questioned a few twitter users about their insecure assumptions. The results were depressing.
Ironically, most of those who were calling Trump ignorant hadn’t even heard of the Cologne incident. Virtually all assumed that, because I sought to correct a story that set Trump in a bad light, I must be a gunned-up supporter of the world’s most depressing politician.
Too many people have reached the stage where, if they disapprove of somebody or something, they feel the need to blindly accept any story that casts that person or thing in a negative light. Similar rules apply for anecdotes that support their worldview. Consider the Welsh bus for confirmation.
Sorry, Mr Mulder. However much you may wish to believe, the aliens really aren’t occupying Oklahoma.
Beware confirmation bias.
