Logical Fallacies - Confirmation Bias

I remember Gordon B. Hinckley liked to say that if you always look for shadows rather than light, you are likely to find them.  He was pointing out that many critics of the church fall prey to a logical fallacy often called confirmation bias, a kind of fallacy of incomplete evidence.  The idea is that if you believe something is true, you tend to primarily notice evidence for that thing, while missing much of the evidence against it.  Often this happens without the participants even noticing.



When I was a young child, I found a five leaf clover.  I asked an older child what that meant.  The child said that if a four leaf clover was good luck, the five leaf clover would be bad luck.  For the next few months, every negative thing that happened contributed evidence to that idea.  Positive things happened during that period, too, but they didn't get added to my pool of evidence.  So I concluded that my friend was right.  I had bad luck from that clover.  This was a classic case of confirmation bias.

Members of the Church are no less vulnerable to this particular bias than anyone else.  Let's say a member gets the idea that church doctrine stipulates Priesthood Blessings are invalid if an Elder participating in the blessing isn't wearing a white dress shirt and neck tie.  I guarantee you that there are statements people make during lessons, and snippets of conference talks that could be found to give credence to this idea.  Each quote adds to the pool of evidence that the member has which confirms the idea.  But there is also a great deal of evidence against such doctrine.  That evidence is not collected, and so the member keeps the skewed idea of how the Priesthood works.

Definitely, this is the case when members try to divine the Lord's stance on homosexuality.  Lots of people have pet theories, and everyone can find evidence to support those theories.  However, few people are really collecting good evidence -- it's almost all biased by preconceived notions, primarily noticing and gathering the evidence that confirms those notions.  The problem is that this bias is perfectly natural, and most people don't even recognize their error (although they can often spot it in their opposition).  It tends to keep parties from sitting down and really discussing the issues.  We need to all recognize our own shortcomings in our logic if we want to have useful dialog.