This article was originally planned as part of the debunking series, “Why The Secret Seems To Work”. As I wrote, I decided it was good as a stand alone article. Still, if you’re interested, you’ll find the Secret series linked at the end of this post. Now I’ll shush with my ramblings, and get on with the posting.
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The subconscious mind has a lot of interesting tricks up its cerebellum sleeve.

One of them, officially known as “confirmation bias”, plays a big part in our instinctive responses… and it’s also one reason that otherwise rational people tend to believe weird, sometimes irrational things.

So what exactly IS this ‘confirmation bias’?

It’s a fancy-pants $10 phrase that means exactly what you might think: We’re unconsciously biased towards information, experiences and interpretations that confirm our expectations and beliefs.

Simply put? Our brains are wired to count “hits” as more important than “misses.” When it comes to our desires, beliefs and expectations, positives are more important to us than negatives.

While the bias often leads us to cling to false conclusions, there’s actually a good reason our brains are set up that way.

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Here’s how it works:

Let’s say we were lost in the wilderness, searching for food.

By chance, we stumble across a blackberry bush, with a handful of luscious ripe berries. We eat them, then look for more bushes. The next five bushes we find don’t have any berries on them, but the sixth bush we check has enough fruit to feed us for two days.

In this situation, our survival depends on our giving more importance to the time we found the berries, than the times that we came up empty handed.

Finding the berries in the first bush sets up the expectation: bush= food. Our mind disregards the five “miss” bushes, and we continue looking. Eventually we find another bush with berries, we’re rewarded for our belief in berries on bushes, and the whole thing reinforces the expectation of bush=food.

It’s a good tactic.

If our brain had assigned as much importance to the misses as the hits, we’d probably have stopped looking for bushes, gone back to random hunting for food under rocks, and we might have starved. Instead, the biased-brain strategy pays off, and we’re rewarded with more blackberries.

Cool, huh?

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Why aren’t we more aware of it?

This confirmation bias is part of what I call the brain’s “autopilot” function; processing that goes on well below the surface of our conscious awareness or attention. The auto-pilot brain helps us cope with survival on a very basic level, a level that doesn’t require intellect or thought or awareness. In fact, it may be built to by-pass our intellectual process, so we cant think ourselves out of survival.

Being the thinking, reasoning, intellectual creatures that we are (And proud of it!) we mostly assume that any and all of our thoughts are the results of our intellectual reasoning. We don’t pay much attention to how often the auto-pilot is on, or how strongly it influences us in our day to day decision making process… but it does influence us.

No matter how smart we are… when we look at facts related to our expectations and desires, we pay more attention to facts, experience and information that support the result we want or expect. When it works, it works well.. but when it doesn’t.. we wind up very convinced in things that may be very wrong.

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Our hit-over-miss bias can be used against us

Fraudulent psychics and spiritual con-artists are well aware of our preference for hits over misses. They know that all they need is for one chance prediction to come true, one accurate guess, and we’ll tend to dismiss all of the false and inaccurate things they’ve said.

We don’t need anyone intentionally fooling us, either… our bias towards the positive hits can cause us to leap to some startling conclusions, including that even the most simplistic astrology is accurate, Big Foot and ancient astronauts really exist, and that old Aunt Eunice can really give you the evil eye, and muck up your whole day.

It’s part of why mystical believers can be so devout, even in the face of scientific studies disproving their beliefs, and it’s also why skeptics can be so stubbornly skeptical, able to blindly dismiss any evidence that might support a mystical explanation — because their confirmation bias leads them to do exactly that.

Mind you, just because our confirmation bias is in play doesn’t mean we’re wrong about our beliefs or expectations. Blackberries DO grow on bushes, after all, and Aunt Eunice IS eerily frightening… but our bias towards the hits makes our instinctive belief an unreliable standard.

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Ok, but… what does this have to do with The Secret?

The Secret states that that *whatever* we hold in our mind, we bring into reality.

Not just things we see as goals, or desires, or intent, not even things we dwell on… but any old thing that we think about, we mystically manifest.

That’s where our hit-over-miss bias comes into play.

Statistically speaking, some of the things we think of *will* happen, even if we take no action towards them at all. Every once in a long while, someone will randomly think of a giant tie-dyed elephant just exactly the moment before a circus parade is turns down the street, complete with a rainbow-clad elephant named Hippie.

Most of the time, of course, we could spend a full week meditating on a tie-dyed elephant, and it would never manifest; the same goes for any number of other unlikely scenarios.

But all if that ONE unlikely elephant appears, we forget all about the other things we thought of that *didn’t* happen -winning the lottery, the tea-party with Elton John, the exploding Tasmanian duck.

Our auto-pilot brain notes the elephant as a hit, ignores the misses, and .. tada.. we must have magically manifested the elephant.

So, that’s how our confirmation bias contributes to the apparent success of The Secret — If you count the times it works, ignore the times it doesn’t, The Law of Attraction winds up with a very skewed 100% success rate.

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MindTweak: If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments. - Malcolm Gladwell, in Blink
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