Episode 262 (Transcript): Big Ideas | Confirmation Bias
Episode Transcript
Many thanks to listener Erica Larsen for her work in transcribing this episode!
This episode can be found on any podcast app or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:
CW: Anything that doesn’t validate our existing beliefs, anything that doesn’t support our doctrine, anything that gives like a different slant to a story.
SH: Yeah.
CW: Is what I think we called Anti.
SH: Yes. Yes.
CW: I mean, we were specifically taught to only read and watch and listen to materials that support church teachings. I think that was explicit.
SH: Hello, I’m Susan Hinkley.
CW: I’m Cynthia Winward,
SH: And this is At Last She Said It. We are Women of Faith discussing complicated things. And the title of today’s episode is Big Ideas: Confirmation Bias.
Okay. But before we start, Cynthia, I’m going to… just... I’m just gonna do it. I’m gonna make a plea for donations right at the beginning of the show.
Okay. I mean, we appreciate everyone who supports At Last She Said It, whether that be through subscribing to our substack with a paid subscription, or whether that be just hitting the donate button, right, and making a donation. Or we have people who send us checks or Venmo, but we very often tout the benefits of being a paid substack subscriber. But today I’m just gonna ask for straight up donations.
So, great either way that you wanna support us, but
CW: Great either way.
SH: Yeah, we do have expenses. They continue six years in. I know that you know, we were novel a while ago and we’re not now. But our expenses remain the same, and so we could use some help.
CW: Our expenses have actually gone up because we’re tired and so we have brought on a few more people to help us.
SH: Right.
CW: And we have so many good people that say to us all the time, please don’t ever stop doing this. And it’s like, well, it’s also really hard to do a job for practically free, even if it is a labor of love.
SH: Correct.
CW: But you and I were recently looking into maybe commercials to kind of solve this problem.
SH: Right.
CW: But the more we’ve looked into it and the more we listen to podcasts that have commercials, you and I have decided we don’t want our sentences cut off mid sentence. Literally. I’m thinking of a very specific podcast. You and I both listened to it and in the middle of the sentence, there was a commercial.
SH: Yep.
CW: And I refuse to have commercials for like supplements and car washes just like spliced between our brilliant thoughts.
SH: Totally agree.
CW: That’s my plea.
SH: Yeah, that’s the plea. Help us keep this project going, friends. We appreciate your support.
CW: Yes. Thank you. Thank you.
SH: All right, let’s talk about something bigger and more important now: Confirmation bias.
CW: Alright, well there are a few terms that seem to get a lot of airtime in this faithy space. I’ll be honest, Susan, until 12 years ago when everything had burnt down for me, I don’t even know if I had heard the phrase confirmation bias.
SH: Agreed.
CW: People who are like psychology majors should be rolling their eyes right now, but I just hadn’t. Okay –I’m just gonna be honest. I wasn’t familiar with that psychological term. And we just had an episode on shadow work because that’s another psychological term that gets thrown around a lot as well.
And this is what Brian McLaren has to say about confirmation bias. He said, “You may have heard the old saying that people only change their minds when the pain of not changing surpasses the pain of changing. That old saying is all about confirmation bias.”
SH: Yeah.
CW: Nailed it.
SH: That’s a great way to describe it. Nailed it, indeed. I think this is such a timely topic to me because I think that confirmation bias plays into identity and tribalism, which are both kind of running rampant for a variety of reasons. In the world, not just in the United States but in the world right now. And they’re driving so much of what’s going on in the world.
And I think churches are a great example. Like Mormons believe X, Y, Z because I’m a Mormon, I don’t listen to anything that doesn’t fit into the X, Y, Z box. Right? I mean, literally. And it makes it easy to dismiss just about everything else. It’s kind of like putting a border wall around your brain.
CW: That’s a good visual actually of a wall around your brain. I agree. Well, before we get much further, how about we actually define confirmation bias. Because I can’t be the only one, Susan, who didn’t [know], wait, what? What’s confirmation bias? That I didn’t know this term, you know, until a dozen or so years ago.
SH: Right.
CW: So the definition of confirmation bias is the human tendency to seek validation for existing beliefs. As humans, we selectively gather evidence that supports our current position. We actually give undue weight to supportive data while discounting or ignoring contradictory data.
SH: Well, I mean, who doesn’t wanna be right, Cynthia? I love being right. I insist on being right.
CW: You insist on it.
SH: I only wanna be right. Honestly, as I’ve thought about this, I’m not sure that any high demand religions could exist without the existence of confirmation bias. I think you have to have it to develop the kind of loyalty that’s required in a space where you’re dealing with ideas that can’t be proven or disproven.
CW: Ooh, yeah.
SH: That’s what you’re dealing with in religion, right? You’re dealing with this set of assertions that nobody can prove or disprove. So how are you going to keep reinforcing the truth of your position to yourself? You have to develop some other way to sort ideas rather than facts. Right? Because in some areas of thinking you can use facts to determine when you’re right or when you’re not. But in religion, you really can’t do that. So you’re gonna sort your ideas based on whether or not they support what you are doing, and so it sort of becomes a loop.
CW: Yeah.It does become a loop for sure. In some ways what you’re talking about, it makes me think this might be the ultimate, “my team is the best.”
SH: Right, right, right.
CW: The Yankees are the best. The Red Sox are the worst. I’m really proud I even knew that rivalry because I know nothing about sports, but I do know that rivalry is a real one, so that’s where my brain went. As you’re talking about, you know, the loyalty that’s required –’Cause you’re right, we’re not dealing with facts in religion despite what some people might think. I wanna break down that definition a little bit. Okay –the part of the definition of confirmation bias that talks about how we seek for things that validate our existing beliefs.
Okay. I’m gonna ask you a question. Do you ever anymore hear the phrase anti-Mormon literature?
SH: Okay.
CW: Like that was a huge buzz phrase.
SH: Yes.
CW: In the eighties and nineties, like pre-internet of course. There is no more literature –It’s all on the internet now.
SH: Well, and I would say that it sort of got shortened to just Anti. “Is something Anti?” is how I would hear it. Like when I was younger I heard anti-Mormon literature and then it just became anti. “Is that anti?”You’re right. It was– that was a huge buzz during the time that I was growing up and I am trying to think of whether I hear that anymore or not.
CW: Well,
SH: I don’t really think, I don’t really think I do very much.
CW: We’re gonna get to that though. Put a pin in that, because we do it in a different way. We just don’t use those exact same words, but anything that doesn’t validate our existing beliefs, anything that doesn’t support our doctrine, anything that gives like a different slant to a story…
SH: Yeah.
CW: Is what I think we called anti.
SH: Yes. Yes.
CW: I mean, we were specifically taught to only read and watch and listen to materials that support church teachings. I think that was explicit.
SH: I’d love to know when that started. I’m not totally sure.
I mean, I know that it was true –definitely for my whole lifetime, but I have to think that represented a shift at some point because I was looking at a quote from Joseph F. Smith yesterday. I came across it about something else. But anyway, I came across this quote, and he was echoing Joseph Smith when he said this, but it says, “we are willing to receive all truth from whatever source it may come.”
And that’s pretty high irony in a church where you’re not allowed to seek truth outside of any approved sources. Which was very explicit counsel for most of my life, and I mean, there have even been times when, even what music my word choir was allowed to sing was controlled.
CW: Yes.
SH: So like this –we built a serious wall.
CW: I would actually be really interested, maybe we need to contact a church historian and ask when was that evolution of anti-Mormon literature. Like when did those warnings towards us begin? I don’t know. I’d be really, I’d love to know.
SH: I’d love to know too. I would.
CW: Okay. So when it comes to confirmation bias, it exists because our brains are just trying to keep us safe. Like our brains are always looking for more efficient ways to interpret information. And our brains are always going to look for, speaking for myself, Susan, I know I’m always looking for cognitive shortcuts, right?
SH: I’m pretty sure that’s just because you’re a human being, Cynthia.
CW: Exactly. I think this is a human problem or not even a problem –This is just how we are. So if we already believe something, then ideas that support a specific belief are, let’s just say, smoother and easier to process. But if ideas that are contradictory start getting thrown at us, then that really slows down this processing of information in our brains. That makes sense to me.
And when that happens too much, that kind of leads to decision making fatigue.
SH: Okay.
CW: And our brains don’t like that. Not only can it fatigue our brains, but it can also be really painful. And back to Brian McLaren. He said in a CAC meditation, that we will link to, and that’s where I got the beginning quote from as well.
He said, “My brain has a lot going on, so it interprets hard work like this as pain, wanting to save me from that extra reframing work. My brain presses a reject or delete button when a new idea presents itself. I’ll stick with my current frame. ‘Thank you very much.’ It says, and it gives me a little jolt of pleasure to reward me for my efficiency.”
SH: Okay. That has a ring of definite truth or familiarity, I guess.
CW: Doesn’t it?
SH: Yes. And me saying truth or familiarity in the same sentence is a great shorthand for confirmation bias. I love that he just said that ‘cause it’s exactly what I think.
CW: Exactly.
SH: You know, if Richard Roar says that “Suffering is whenever I’m not in control,” then it totally makes sense to me that controlling my own brain becomes like the first line of defense against experiencing the most basic kind of pain. It just makes sense.
CW: Right. Okay. I really love that you just brought up the word pain, because that goes back to the opening line from Brian McLaren that people only change their minds when the pain of not changing surpasses the pain of changing. So I guess we could say like, pain /discomfort, whatever we’re gonna label it, is first of all, that’s gonna happen in life no matter what. But we rarely do something about it – need to do something about it, want to do something about it, until we absolutely have to. And I totally believe that until the greater pain exceeds the lesser pain, we just don’t do something about it.
There’s a lot of information coming at us, right? We can’t sit there and process and take everything apart and see what we think about it. I mean, do you remember when we had Dr. Jennifer Bird on the episode about a year and a half ago, and we kept using that phrase, “putting something on the shelf,” and she was like, “Wait, what is this?”
SH: Yes, yes.
CW: Because that’s what we do! We put less painful items on the shelf so that we don’t have to deal with them. Maybe with the hopes of taking them off the shelf someday and analyzing or not.
SH: Yeah. It was so interesting to both of us that she was experiencing that phrase as something that must be like a uniquely Mormon thing. Because she,
CW: Yeah, I don’t know.
SH: Because we used it so freely, I guess, and just without really thinking, that it was just sort of a given assumption that people knew what putting something on the shelf was. But she was not really familiar with that. So that was pretty interesting because it highlighted something that might be a feature, I guess. Okay. I’m not gonna say a feature. It might be an effect of being raised with a Mormon mindset. This wall that I’m talking about. It might be an effect to have shorthand, like putting something on the shelf that a lot of us have developed that coping mechanism to protect us from that pain.
As you’re talking about pain and it being necessary to force change to happen. I’m wondering if, I’m wondering what it is that causes the pain? Like is it your brain getting pelted often enough with something that contradicts the thing that you think? Like is there a critical mass that you hit when there’s so much information coming at it that no longer supports?
Or is it your experience coming in and causing cognitive dissonance with the things that you think? Or is it a combination of both things or can it happen either way? Or I don’t know –I’m just interested to know where that pain really originates.
CW: Well, I know I can speak for myself, like if you just toss out an idea in a Sunday school and if it’s kind of itchy to me, it’s not settling well… Like I can sit there and just yap about it with somebody all day long and theorize. But when it becomes personal, so I think you’re onto something when you say, Did you use the word Experience?
SH: Yeah. Personal experience.
CW: Yeah. So when it becomes a personal experience, I feel like that’s when the pain becomes amplified.
When things are literally going on in your family and you’re having to deal with it every single day, that’s a lot different than just being in a Sunday school class and arguing about a doctrinal topic or something, if you know what I mean.
SH: Right, right. I guess your life presents you with tangible evidence of the thing that you have kind of not wanted to believe.
Could be true.
CW: I mean, doesn’t that ring true for you? When you think about it.
SH: Yes. A hundred percent, yes.
CW: Yeah, same. Same for me. Okay, so let’s dig in a little more. Let’s give a fun example of confirmation bias. If I believe eating a bag of chocolate every day is good for my health. Then I’m a lot more likely, I think, to read articles, watch videos, share Instagram reels with you, Susan, all saying chocolate is really good for me to eat every day.
SH: Right.
CW: And I want to be with people who also believe that.
SH: Right.
CW: And at the same time, I will ignore info that challenges my assumption that eating a bag of chocolate every day is good for my health. I’m going to ignore that in favor of what I want to believe. Well, that’s not even fair to say what I want to believe, because I believe it’s genuine.
Like these biases that we hold are... We came to them honestly, is what I’m trying to say. Especially when we’re talking about churchy and faithy things.
SH: I mean, in most cases, but also a lot of the OS on my brain came pre-installed when I got the brain. Because I mean, I don’t like to use the word indoctrination, but some of those things I didn’t really choose, if you see what I’m saying.
They were just given to me and I believed them because I believed authority figures in my life. You know, there are all kinds of reasons why I might have believed them.
So I wonder if it matters. I wonder if the pain threshold matters also based on how you came to the information and like why you believe it.
I don’t know. It seems like this could be a complicated topic when you start to try to untangle how it works. And how it falls apart.
CW: Oh, I think that’s why its a big idea.
SH: Yeah. Oh, duh. Okay. Can I just say duh right here? Because for the first time in the conversation –I’ll say it 10 more times before we’re done.
CW: Okay. Well then let’s put in a few more duh moments in here for a second, because if we’re gonna talk about confirmation bias, I think we also need to touch quickly on how confirmation bias is often the tool that our brains use to avoid the pain of cognitive dissonance.
SH: Okay,
CW: So there’s another phrase we’re gonna talk about just for a minute –cognitive dissonance.
And Brene Brown defines cognitive dissonance as a state of tension that occurs when a person holds two cognitions, meaning ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions, that are psychologically inconsistent with each other.
So when I read that definition, I thought, okay, so let me think of two cognitions that are inconsistent with each other. A woman can believe the church’s doctrine of marriage is only between a man and a woman. And my gay daughter deserves love and happiness in a marriage to a woman. Like those are two inconsistent cognitions or beliefs.
SH: Right.
CW: And it’s funny because I was working on these show notes about a week ago and specifically about that example about marriage only being between a man and a woman.
Nevermind polygamy. Susan –polygamy sitting over there in the corner going, wait, what? ‘cause it’s pretty rich that we have the idea that marriage is only between a man and a woman.
SH: Yes. Right.
CW: Anyway, that’s just me being snarky. Sorry about that. But I was thinking about this. This example of cognitive dissonance of these two cognitions competing with each other.
And I ended up having a conversation that very day with a friend. She has two queer children. And so I decided –I know her really well and I decided I’m just gonna test this idea of cognitive dissonance with her. And so I gave her that exact example. Okay. The two competing ideas, marriage is only between a man and a woman, and a gay child deserves love and happiness in a marriage.
And I said personally, when I had to wrestle with those two cognitions, I eventually came to the conclusion, well the church is wrong about this. The church is wrong about our gay kids not being able to marry. And my friend immediately spoke up and she said, “Oh, I’m really good at saying I will not think about something. And really, I don’t.”
Now, I also wanna say, I don’t normally press people like this when I see cognitive dissonance surface, like I’m a nice person, Susan.
SH: Right.
CW: And I get that this stuff is really tender and it’s really tenuous and I’m never going to, like my goal is never to tear down people’s beliefs and get them to admit the church is wrong or anything.
But this good friend of mine, she’s an English teacher – she’s brilliant. Like she can handle these kinds of conversations. Anyway, just having that conversation with my friend, as I was driving home that day, I thought, “Wow, the longer we do this podcast, the more true our tagline becomes for me, “women discussing complicated things.”
SH: Right.
CW: Because I really can’t think of anything more complicated than for parents to have to wrestle with those two competing cognitions about marriage and our gay kiddos.
SH: Okay. This raises a question for me, and I don’t know if you… Well, I’ll be interested to hear if you have an answer and what you think about it.
So, you know, there’s the famous Joseph Smith line, “In proving contrary, Truth is made manifest.”
And so I’m a huge fan of paradox and of the idea of being able to hold two competing ideas. “Both/ and” is kind of one approach to it. Right. But I mean, I feel like some people have more ability maybe to carry paradox and handle it than other people do.
I don’t know. I seem to be pretty well suited to that and I sort of get off on it, honestly.
Paradox is …I like it. I like it. I thrive on exploring those kinds of questions. I like to come at life sort of through the paradox of it. That’s a thing that fires my brain, I guess is what we’ll say, in pleasing ways.
So how do you think that’s different than the situation that you were just describing where you had two competing ideas?
CW: Well, just off the top of my head, to me the difference is one really hurts people. Like what I’m talking about –like this causes are LGBTQ kiddos to take their lives. So I don’t know. This is all just off the top of my head. I need a day to think about this, Susan, and I’ll get back with you. But those two cognitions that compete with each other, I guess what I’m trying to say is for some people that doesn’t create cognitive dissonance.
SH: I think it did for her though. I think it did for her because she said I am able to just not think about it.
CW: Okay. That’s a good point. Yeah.
SH: So like that was a coping, a specific coping mechanism.
CW: Right
SH: I’m gonna put that on the shelf. Right. That’s an example of “I’m just gonna put that on the shelf.”
CW: That’s a perfect example of putting it on the shelf for sure.
SH: Right, right.
CW: That’s just kind of my knee jerk reaction or my knee jerk answer to your question. Personally speaking, I had to ease – I’m not really good at putting things on the shelf long term and so I had to ease my own cognitive dissonance. And the conclusion I came to was
SH: you had to choose one
CW: what I was wrong about
SH: Right.
CW: I had to choose one. And I chose the one that will give my daughter a healthy and happy outcome in her life. As opposed to saying, “No, you need to remain celibate.” And that is not a healthy thing to –that is not a doctrinally healthy idea for people to force on them.
SH: Yeah. And I don’t think that we’re not meant to make those kinds of shifts and those kinds of choices. I think that we are, I think that’s part of the journey of life and of spiritual growth and personal growth is making those choices. Yes. And sometimes they’re hard. They represent a hard left turn for us. I guess I would say maybe confirmation bias is something that steps in to try to protect us from having to do that. To try
CW: A hundred percent
SH: to keep us from growing. And so confirmation bias says, put that on the shelf. Just put that on the shelf.
CW: Yes.
SH: And don’t think about it.
CW: Thank you for saying it that way. That kind of goes with Brian McLaren. He said in his book, Faith After Doubt, “When enough conflicting desires wrestle within us, the faith crisis becomes an identity crisis.”
SH: Yes. Yes. Okay. This is what I think happens then. I think it all blows up when your confirmation bias is no longer enough to protect you, right? The wall starts getting torn down and you can’t shore up the wall as fast as it’s being torn apart. I’m guessing, Cynthia, that so many of our listeners are nodding right now, saying yes. You just described my current church life.
CW: When your shelf begins to bow because you’ve put too much on it, right, and it crashes to the ground, then I would say that’s what Brian McLaren is talking about. When enough of those conflicting desires get put on the shelf, then not only can a faith crisis ensue, but for people in high demand religions, it really does become an identity crisis. You and I have seen that over and over.
SH: right?
CW: And over.
SH: Yes. Absolutely. It goes straight. It pulls the earth itself right out from under people’s feet. What do I believe becomes who even am I?
CW: Yes.
SH: I’ve seen that. You’re questioning all your life choices, right? You’re questioning everything. You can go straight to nihilism. Yeah. It’s… this is intense stuff.
CW: Okay. A little bit more from Brene Brown about cognitive dissonance. She said, “When we’re faced with information that challenges what we believe, our first instinct is to make the discomfort, irritation, and vulnerability go away by resolving the dissonance. We might do this by rejecting the new information, decreasing its importance or avoiding it altogether.”
SH: There you go. Yeah. There you go.
CW: That is what my friend was saying she does. Like, “I just am not gonna think about that.” “The greater the magnitude of the dissonance,” this is still Brene Brown. “The greater the magnitude of the dissonance, the greater is the pressure to reduce the dissonance.”
SH: Sure. I had a really funny experience with this the other day that just comes to mind as Brene Brown is explaining that. The missionaries came over to share an Easter message with us.
CW: Oh.
SH: And there were just some really funny moments to me because they asked my husband and I to sit down with them. These were two young men by the way, and they asked what each of us thought about the Atonement.
And I had a one little brief moment of panic as I looked at these sweet little 18-year-old boys thinking, how am I gonna soften my thoughts? Which are definitely not gonna be what they were thinking they’re gonna hear when they asked the question.
CW: Uhhuh, right?
SH: I’m thinking, how am I gonna not shock these sweet young things? And before I could even figure out what to say, my husband piped up and he said, “Well, I no longer believe in penal substitutionary Atonement.”
CW: Of course he did
SH: Total blank stares from the missionaries. So then he asked them, do you know what that is? And of course they said no.
So he explained it to them. More silence, Cynthia, just like nothing. And then one of them, just like motored right past it with a sort of standard LDS atonement testimony, right. Without engaging with what he said at all. Just like zero discussion about it. The idea didn’t even land, it wasn’t even a glancing blow.
It went right over their heads. It was like seeing a barrier in the road and then like watching the missionaries shift into four-wheel drive to just keep driving right over it. They didn’t even slow down. And then it happened again later in the conversation when one of them was
CW: Oh, really?
SH: Yeah. He was telling what he thought was a very faith promoting tidbit that was making a pretty dubious scriptural connection and historical connection. And my husband just asked him for a source. He’s like, “Do you have a source for that?”
And the missionary’s like, “I don’t… what do you mean?”
My husband was like, “Well, where did that come from?” And it was just the same blank stare. And then the other one just piped up and mowed down my husband’s question with another testimony.
And as I watched it, I thought,
CW: Fascinating!
SH: Of course, most missionaries must have to live in that kind of head space in order to survive the two year experience that they’re having. Right? They have to be zeroed in on one kind of thinking, I guess, one path.
CW: Yeah.
SH: It seems to me that a mission might be like the ultimate exercise in confirmation bias, because sometimes you just have to opt for self preservation.
CW: Well, absolutely, and I mean, they’re working for the organization.
SH: Right.
CW: I mean, I get it. And they’re young. So yeah, there are a lot of things that would encourage confirmation bias in our young missionaries. Their age, as well as they’re working for the org, as well as, I’m just gonna say it Susan, these little missionaries that went to see the Hinkley’s were probably expecting you guys to just nicely nod, you know. Instead of saying
SH: Oh, I think they were!
CW: “Here’s this, and what do you think about this?” Like, I don’t think they were expecting Brother Hinkley to challenge them at all.
SH: Right. And I think that the church knows that. I mean, I think that the church approaches missions in a way that sets them up to be able to maintain that confirmation bias. They’re not allowed to listen to any, you know, it’s a very tightly controlled list of things that they are able to engage with. It’s gotten a little better over time. It used to not even be able… it used to not even be able to call your family. So like, it used to be even more tightly controlled and now they’re on social media a little bit and stuff. So like the church has loosened that grip a little bit, but I think it’s gotta be really important to keep these kids on track.
When a member raises an issue for you, like happened in that example, here’s how you go around it. You just say what you know. You just say what you know. You go back to what you know.
CW: You just put that car, what was it? You put it in four wheel drive and you just mow over.
SH: Just keep driving Yep. Just keep driving.
CW: I have this image of these little missionaries in a four wheel drive car just bulldozing. And it rings so true to me!
SH: Oh bless them! I’m such a soft spot for missionaries and I also just wanted to cheer when my husband was not doing the mental gymnastics that I was trying to do to protect them. Like I appreciated both parts of that.
CW: I love this example so much.
SH: It was a funny experience. Everything about it.
CW: Yeah. I wish I could have been there.
Okay. Let’s talk really specifically about some of our LDS examples of confirmation bias. This is where things could get a little pokey, okay? Because we’re gonna get really specific.
Number one that I thought of is the God of the lost car keys, right? Everything is a tender mercy or anything,
SH: Right
CW: Not just car keys, but substitute any kind of anything small, any type of little positive coincidence. I mean, I just heard a young woman in my ward give a talk about losing an AirPod, and she prayed and God helped her find her lost AirPod.
It was in a shoe that she never wears. Okay?
SH: Okay.
CW: Anyway, so much grace for an 18-year-old girl who is, you know, figuring out how God works in her life. So I totally get that. But I think we see the God of the lost car keys or the God of lost AirPods, whatever, as direct interventions from God. Like they’re faith promoting stories that confirm. There’s the confirmation bias that confirms to us that God is in all the details of our lives. But I think they are rife, Susan, they are filled with confirmation bias because we focus on the times that we do find the car keys. Right. And we just ignore all the other stories, the other times where we didn’t find the car keys or the AirPod or whatever.
SH: Right.
CW: Okay. But first of all I wanna make it clear that I actually do believe in a God of tender mercies. I don’t really like that phrase. So maybe I would say it as like, I believe in a God that is aware of all of the little and big details of my life.
SH: Okay.
CW: But I do think that there’s a big difference between, personally speaking for me, I’ve always believed in God’s love and awareness of me.
Like that’s really powered my faith for most of my life. There’s a difference between that and believing in an interventionist God. And maybe that’s just how I make sense of the suffering in this world. I mean, I just can’t believe that God helps someone find their AirPod, but doesn’t answer the prayers of the mothers in Gaza.
SH: Right.
CW: If you know what I mean.
SH: No, I absolutely do. I mean, of course we’re talking about some of the oldest and most basic human questions, right. And I feel like… So I feel like it’s important to point out that as we go through and give some LDS specific examples of where we see this stuff, it’s not just because we are making the suggestion that Latter Day Saints are somehow more prone to this thinking problem than other people. This is very human –all of these are human behaviors.
People try to connect dots of meaning in their lives. This is what human beings do. And I think for good reason, I think there are reasons.
CW: Sure.
SH: That, you know, that’s one of the prime things that we’re engaged in on this earth as human beings.
But I think we just use LDS specific examples because they’re things that we will all recognize. And so
CW: Exactly.
SH: Easy for us saying that –to point out. But I think that church members, and probably in any kind of group, that in our church I’ll point out, I think church members engage in all kinds of group confirmation bias.
I think it’s called Sacrament Meeting, Sunday School, and Relief Society, actually. But we go to church expecting to hear certain kinds of stories and then don’t even think about them. Like, when’s the last time you really deeply engaged with something that you heard at church?
CW: Right.
SH: This is why I’ve often said like, I think we’re asked to turn our brains off when we come into the building. I think we just shift into a gear –the CB gear. We shifted the confirmation bias gear and just expect that everything is going to reaffirm something that we already know or think.
One of my favorite sacrament meetings ever, and I may have told about this before, but it involved the first speaker getting up and telling about a miracle where someone in their life was saved by the enormous faith of their family. And they had a stake fast. You know, it was a whole story of how this person had a dire diagnosis and they did all, they used all the spiritual tools at our disposal, and the person was spared.
The next speaker got up and told a heartbreaking story of their child dying despite the fact that they did all the same things.
These two people could not have planned more opposite talks if they had sat down together and decided to, you know, show an example on each side. They did everything medical and spiritual that they could possibly do. The child died anyway. And as I sat there listening to this just gut-wrenching story, I felt so sorry for the first speaker.
CW: Yeah.
SH: I felt like everyone in the room must be shifting uncomfortably in their seats because like, this was really hard. and it was really unfortunate that those talks bumped up against each other. But I loved that they did because it gave us an opportunity to see the problems in some of the ways that we talk about our experiences in church.
And so later after that, I was talking to a friend. I was like, “Could you even believe in Sacrament meeting when this happened?” And she didn’t even remember there being any contradiction
CW: Really?
SH: Yeah.
CW: Okay. What does that mean? Susan was like, your antenna…
SH: Her brain was off! No, I mean, I just think this,
CW: I just, okay. I see what you’re saying.
SH: I think we don’t …we don’t generally don’t even think. But I guess maybe because I was in, this happened at a time when I was in a pretty deconstructed space myself. So I was maybe looking at church through a different lens. I was looking for different kinds of ideas there. And probably pretty interested in finding the holes in what I was hearing, maybe, you know what I mean?
CW: Sounds like it.
SH: I was very in a critical stage. I was in a very critical stage on my own journey. So I think I just saw it differently. I engaged with that material differently from how she did. Anyway. Everything about that story has remained interesting to me. But in this discussion, I think what’s particularly interesting is that she didn’t even notice.
CW: How long ago was this Susan?
SH: I’m gonna say 10 years.
CW: Okay. And you still remember it 10 years later, so,
SH: Oh, I remember everything about it. Yep.
CW: Yeah.And obviously it had quite an impact on you.
SH: It did. It absolutely did.
CW: Yeah. Yeah.
SH: I hadn’t really ever experienced anything quite that stark, I guess, at church.
CW: Yeah.
SH: Where I was seeing our behaviors laid out in that way. So it was interesting.
CW: Well, another example I thought of for confirmation bias was talking about the temple. And you and I have said over and over the temple is now dialed up to 11
SH: Right
CW: These days. And my entire adult life, maybe because I live in Provo and so there are plenty of temples everywhere, I don’t know. But my entire adult life, I have been told to go often and go more. Go weekly. If possible, right?
SH: Yep. Yep.
CW: And we have meetings all about the temple, that point, to going to the temple. More light. Right? We just had Carol Colvin on the podcast talking about an entire women’s conference.
SH: Yes.
CW: All, all about the temple. So yeah, dialed up till 11 is not an overstatement. Temple talk, I think is where the, you know from the confirmation bias definition, the giving undue weight part comes in. Because like, to me
SH: it’s the ultimate big deal.
CW: It’s the ultimate big deal, right? And we give the temple so much weight.
I would say undue weight, but that’s subjective. We give it so much weight that we think… okay, I’ll get personal. It was given so much weight in my life that I thought, well, this must be true. The temple must be the ultimate big deal and it must be the pinnacle of my worship. So I’m going to act as if it is
SH: right,
CW: the pinnacle. And in our book on the Temple chapter, you recall a time where you actually read the book, The Holy Temple. Was that in preparation for you being in doubt or you were just maybe reading it as a young woman?
SH: No, it was in preparation for being endowed. That’s what was given to me for Temple Prep. We didn’t go to a temple prep class of any kind.
CW: Oh.
SH: Somebody, and I don’t remember who, just handed me that book and said, this’ll get you ready.
CW: This will get you ready. Well, you say in our book that you read the line from The Holy Temple, “Your lives will then be in order all things lined up in proper sequence and proper ranks in proper rows.”
SH: right.
CW: I plugged in a paragraph about that here in the document. Can you read that from our book, Susan?
SH: Sure. “I believed it. I envisioned my life planted in neat rows like a garden that would never grow weeds, because I was making the choice to marry in the temple. I know I was seriously naive and that promise of order and unbreakable family appealed to me because I was running headlong into adulthood, in part to escape a childhood that had so often felt precarious and uncertain.”
I think it’s pretty fair to say that the temple was full of superstition for me. Really. As an 18-year-old, that’s kind of the level at which it was operating. You know, I was definitely acting as if it were true, like you mentioned. In hopes of making it true. And I mean, that was all a comfort for me.
Even as hard as the temple has always been for me, that superstitious part of it was enough to override it, right? That was like a comfort for me until my children’s agency suddenly hit my temple confirmation bias with a pin, and the whole thing blew up. It was like, it was too painful for me to want to continue feeding that bias.
That bias was no longer paying me the dividends, I guess, that it always had. And I know another woman that I’m close to who had the exact opposite response. Like when the temple crashed into the reality of other people’s choices in her life, she doubled down and committed to going more. She made a bargain with God.
I mean, those are the words that she uses to describe it. Right? And so like those were two approaches to the same thing. And I’m not saying that my approach was necessarily superior to her approach, but I think because my temple activity had always been rooted in this promise of a life improper rose, when it fell apart there just wasn’t enough to keep me there anymore.
CW: That makes sense.
SH: And for her, she had always been a true believer in the temple, and she didn’t have the baggage with it like I did. You know, it had never been good for me. So like, we’re approaching it from a different place. So she saw and received her comfort by doing exactly the opposite of what I did.
So again, like you said, when we first started talking about this, it’s complicated and we can see the truth of that in real women’s lives. Experiences with this stuff.
CW: Well, and I love that in the last two stories you’ve told, actually the story about the sacrament meeting talk and talking to your friend, she’s like, “Wait, what? I don’t see that.”
And then also with the temple your friend saying, “The temple has always been great for me.” Like I’m really glad that even though we are sharing examples of where this hasn’t, where our confirmation bias has been, how did you say it poked? Like our balloon was poked and it came crashing down and popped our balloon.
I’m glad that we’re also sharing examples where others are like, “no, this is fine.” Because it is complicated and our experience is not everybody’s experience.
SH: Right. No –we can only talk about our own experiences with this stuff.
CW: Right. Okay. If we’re going to talk about confirmation bias, I think we also need to give the example of garments.And there’s been….
SH: Bring it on. Bring it on.
CW: Well, there’s been a whole lot of extra talk lately. I feel about, I think about garments. And you and I have been able to get like this real time observing the natives in their habitat.
SH: Yes.
CW: Kind of a thing. Yes. Seeing like when the, all the buzz online about like the new garments that are open sleeve. And the slip option. And the dress option. And so it’s been really interesting to watch the natives in their habitat, like how are they going to decrease their confirmation bias about that. Anyway, there was a social media comment where a woman said, “I will never get them,” meaning the sleeveless garments. “I think that it is so wrong that the church is loosening its standard of modesty. When, if anything, they should be increasing its standard in order to fight against the scariness of the world.” Wow.
SH: That pretty much tells us everything about her. And very little about
CW: Oh yes.
SH: The change itself. That’s really interesting.
CW: Well, I mean, there’s a lot we could, there’s a lot we could say about that. But here’s the one thing I do wanna say about that, and what it has to do with confirmation bias is the belief here for this woman is that garments protect you from the scary world. Those are, they are her exact words.
SH: Right.
CW: And I get it. Those puzzle pieces fit very nicely for this woman. But now when she’s presented with new info that, “Guess what? It’s okay that they are sleeveless and you can show your arms.” Her bias caused her to double down on the old garment style and say “no this will actually keep you safer if you stick to the old rule instead of having to wrestle with the new rule.”
SH: Right. And I think part of what might be operating there, when I said it says much, it says everything about her. That comment, what I was actually thinking was that it says a lot about her beliefs about the scariness of the world.
CW: Oh, yes.
SH: Which is like this overriding belief. And so then this belief comes in that garments help protect against the scariness of the world.
CW: Yes.
SH: But because nothing yet has challenged her confirmation bias about how scary the world is.
CW: Oh, I see what you’re saying.
SH: And she’s not able to make the shift on garments because that’s just a belief, it’s a subheading. Right? Under the scary world belief. In the case of this argument anyway that she’s making.
So I think sometimes parts of our beliefs can get picked away at, but until sort of the larger umbrella belief starts to struggle to support the weight of all the little things that get picked at then it can be pretty easy to maintain our thinking about all of those subheadings.
CW: You know, it’s really funny, you’re zeroing in on her idea about the scary world because …This is why we’re, this is why we’re friends Susan. We think, some of the time we’re different, but we’re also the same in many ways. Because I, for time purposes I didn’t put it in here, but I had kind of gone down this rabbit hole where I went to lds.org and I searched out “the gospel keeps you safe.”
SH: Oh, interesting.
CW: And the headlines were pretty… they went along exactly with what I thought I would find.
SH: Okay.
CW: Basically, just about how the gospel keeps you safe. And so I actually have a lot of compassion on this woman for whom the world is a very scary place. And the church is what keeps her safe.
SH: Yes.
CW: From the scary world. Anyway, that would be a … now we need another fear episode, Susan. ‘Cause that is something we could tear apart for an hour.
SH: Exhibit A right there. Exhibit A.
CW: Yeah. Okay. But about the garments protecting you. I know I believed this, I don’t know if I actually believed that they were like a physical protection.
SH: Okay.
CW: But I know I believed that they were a spiritual protection from the scary world until, like we were saying in the beginning of this episode. Like I could argue about that maybe like in a Sunday school class, but until it became part of my life, until someone that I deeply loved did some really… I don’t wanna say bad, let’s say worldly, until they did a whole lot of worldly things while wearing their garments.
Then it forced me to look at my biases that I had about garments. And for just one second, I wanna go back to talking about cognitive dissonance and how I kind of broke down this idea for myself about garments when it all blew up for me, because I held these two competing ideas, these competing cognitions. I believed on the one hand that garments spiritually protected me, and I now knew that people can make bad, unhealthy, not spiritually great choices while also wearing them.
Now, if you had pressed me, of course I always knew that. Duh.
SH: Right.
CW: But confronting it in my own life, like I said it’s just different than theoretically speaking about it, like in a Sunday school class. And so
SH: absolutely
CW: For the first time in my life, I really had to, I don’t even know if the right word is, reassess my actual thoughts and beliefs about garments. I’m going to say assess ‘cause maybe this was the first time I actually assessed what I thought and believed vs what the organization had told me to believe about garments. And so again, the pain, going back to Brian McLaren’s definition, the pain of my old beliefs were really painful, Susan. And they now surpassed the pain of maybe changing or even just like figuring out my new beliefs about garments, if that makes sense. Right?
SH: No, it absolutely does. And I think that assess is a better word than reassess probably, because I think very often we specifically keep hands off doing any kind of assessment of our ideas and beliefs out of fear that we might disrupt things. It’s like… oh! You know the –I’ve talked before about my faith life is like behind a velvet rope.
CW: Yes.
SH: Like I specifically did not go there, or like my faith life as a curio cabinet with very carefully arranged collectibles in it, but I did not open the doors and play with those things. Those things stay in the cabinet and I feel like that’s very often the case until something comes along and smashes the cabinet or, you know, knocks down the velvet rope. And you’re forced to weigh it in and start to pick these things up and look at ‘em and figure out how does this function? Does it serve me? Does it make sense with anything that I’m actually experiencing and what do I do with it now?
CW: Yeah.
SH: So I think that assessment happens. But I think many of these things we never really assessed very well to begin with. Like things that we were just… I talk about being baptized and having my pockets already full of things. And those were sort of handed to me. But I didn’t really question them. It didn’t serve me to question them until I was forced.
CW: Yeah. My ideas about garments were handed to me as well. I mean, there are very specific lines told in the Initiatory to me, and I just kind of thought, “Okay, cool.”
SH: Right.
CW: But they were handed to me, they were put into my pocket.
SH: Right.
CW: And that worked until it didn’t.
Okay. A couple more examples. We’ll go quickly ‘cause we’re running outta time here. But can we talk about confirmation bias if we’re not gonna talk about tithing? Because we pay our tithing and then like one time a check will show up in the mail.
SH: Right.
CW: We’ve all heard the stories, right? I paid my tithing, the exact amount came in a check in the mail, a tax refund, a birthday gift, something. And so we tell those stories, but we forget and we never tell the stories of the other 10 times that we didn’t have some kind of miraculous event happen.
SH: Yeah.
CW: Where maybe we paid our tithing and our car was still repossessed or we paid our tithing and we were still seriously underemployed and couldn’t meet our expenses.
SH: Right. Okay. Going back to what I was just saying, what I’m gonna call this example is dusting the items in the Curio cabinet.
CW: Okay.
SH: Very carefully dusting the items. We do that whenever we have an opportunity because something happens that confirms those beliefs. So it’s safe to open the cabinet and dust that item.
CW: Okay.
SH: But leave it carefully there, right? And I’m sure for every example on one side, there’s an example on the other side because life is like that. But what gets amplified at church is always gonna be the story that supports the party line.
CW: That supports the bias.
SH: So I’m not surprised by that, and I’m also not bothered by it on a lot of things. Except that’s easy for me to say as a lifelong …I’m gonna say challenged believer. Like this stuff’s always been hard for me, right? But for someone who really leaned on every promise that they heard or received through church, which many members do, then the confirmation bias balloon only holds you up as long as you can keep putting air in it. And sometimes that balloon just plain gets popped.
It’s like that famous Richard Rohr quote from Falling Upward, where it’s something like, “There must be, and if we are honest, there always will be at least one situation in our lives that we cannot fix, control, explain, change, or even understand.”
CW: Oh my gosh. Yeah.
SH: But I think that what we do with that, it’s either the moment where confirmation bias continues to protect us from any real change or growth or it’s where we throw out what we thought we knew, and that propels us forward.
But there is a lot of choice in that. I think for your friend who said, “I can just decide not to think about that.” I think she’s making a very specific choice. And I think some people can reside in that place for a long time and for some people a lifetime.
CW: Yeah.
SH: I mean, this is like my mother who, I’ve told this story before, of her getting up at the mic and saying, I’ve never had a moment’s doubt in my life.
CW: Right.
SH: “You know, maybe I’m just lucky. I don’t know why I’m this way.” She said, “But I’ve never had a moment’s doubt.” Well, for sure, a hundred percent. That cannot be true for a human being. But it can be true as a choice, I guess.
CW: Yeah.
SH: It can be true as a choice. She has never chosen to open that cupboard.
CW: Yeah. I love that example of just dust. Lightly dusting, slightly dusting.
Okay. For time, let’s move on. I have more to say about tithing, but for now let’s go to our last example of Cynthia’s. Cynthia’s list of things where she sees confirmation bias most prevalent, I think, in our church.
And my last example is in the law of Chastity. And I’m actually going to tell a story that’s not actually from someone in our church, but it’s also about the law of chastity. Because, okay, so the very first season of the CACs podcast, Learning How to See, is all about bias. So like the first episode is confirmation bias, and then Brian McLaren goes on. It’s a fabulous series. We will link to it. But in that first episode where they’re specifically just talking about confirmation bias, the Reverend Dr. Jackie Lewis, she tells a story that I think will resonate with all of us. “Having sex” She said “before marriage was the worst thing that could happen to her.”
And I’m like, my ears perked up, right? I’m like, yes, tell me more.
SH: Next to murder!
CW: Right. Oh gosh. Oh gosh.
SH: But anyway
CW: Yeah. Well, Jackie Lewis said that two weeks before her wedding, she and her fiance had sex. And then two months after her wedding, she and her new husband, they were in an awful car accident.
They actually walked away from the accident. But she said, “I was 100% convinced that breaking the rules two weeks ahead of time is why I had that accident. That haunted me. For years.” So her bias, right, her bias was confirmed by having this accident because she was actively looking for things that support her belief, which is that, you know, having sex before marriage is the worst thing that could possibly, you could possibly do.
SH: Right? I have a good friend who would describe this as masturbating yourself with guilt.
CW: Right?
SH: So this is an example of someone having something happen in their life, and they really do decide to go into the cabinet and do a serious dusting job on their prior beliefs, right? Because for some reason that guilt feels like she, it’s what she’s supposed to feel.
I think that was probably a pretty automatic thing that happened for her. She might’ve liked to disconnect those dots, but that wiring had happened. And so that was happening.
CW: Her pockets were full.
SH: As said, her pockets were full. Absolutely. Cynthia, that is the most Mormon story that I’ve ever heard in my life, and I love that it’s from a non-Mormon, because it means
CW: Right. She was a Baptist at the time –When it happened
SH: Crazy. I think it points to the idea though that like stripping confirmation bias out of our lives can be really painful. Like, I can’t imagine anything more painful than working through the situation that she just described.
CW: Yeah.
SH: Like healing eventually, but like, that’s painful work because this stuff runs so deep and it is woven into every choice that we’ve made. So you go back 30 years later and try to do that work, you got a lot of water that has gone under that bridge, right? It makes me think of another Richard Rohr line from Falling Upward where he says, “Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.”
CW: For sure.
SH: And I’m pretty sure she probably had some miserable years where she believed that she had brought that car accident upon them. You know?
CW: Yeah.
Okay. Well, in our remaining minutes here, let’s go through five ways how we can avoid or reduce confirmation bias. This isn’t from a Buzzfeed article, I promise.
Like I read really reputable psychological sources and they kind of distill down to five ways we can reduce confirmation bias.
SH: Awesome.
CW: And the number one is: Seek opposing views. Actively look for information that challenges your beliefs. And quoting Richard Rohr again, he says, “What you decide to look at determines what you do not see.”
And I thought, okay. That sounds like
SH: Love that line.
CW: As a latter day saint. Right.
SH: Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. See, this was my friend who didn’t see what I saw in that meeting.
CW: Right, exactly.
SH: We were looking for different things.
CW: Right, right. I also thought of social media algorithms. They are not your friend, Susan. Well, maybe they are your friend. They actually might be your best friend. Because depending on how
SH: Yeah. I love my algorithm, Cynthia.
CW: Well, depending,
SH: Don’t take it away from me!
CW: I know. The bots know you well at this point. So, I mean, depending on how you look at it, they’re your best friend or they’re your worst friend because they just constantly feed you.
And so you begin to think, “Oh, the whole world feels this way, loves what I love this way.”
SH: Right.
CW: Right. And Nadia Bolz-Weber, she actually wrote for her substack an article called “A Mirrored Fun House of Confirmation Bias.”
SH: Okay.
CW: If that isn’t the greatest title ever! Anyway you can go look it up.
But basically she tells the whole story about how the algorithm had figured her out and she was like, “I felt really naive because I thought, wow! Everyone else loves Shape Note singing and Coast to Coast Walks and UK and Gen X feminists and Nick Cage.” You know, so she was like, “Oh. And then I finally realized, like the algorithm was just showing me what I already think”
SH: right?
CW: So it’s just feeding her confirmation biases.
SH: Ouch.
CW: So I guess I’m just bringing up the point of social media algorithms to say like, it’s not our fault, Susan. Like, this is getting actually really hard to confront our confirmation biases. It’s really hard to seek opposing views if we only seek those opposing views on social media, because that ain’t what the bots are showing you.
SH: When I saw your list of five things here in the notes I was trying to think of like, what is an LDS example that I can apply these to understand how they would, how they could operate for someone who really wanted to approach something in their life. Trying to strip the confirmation bias out of it.
And it occurred to me that like, I think the scriptures maybe could be a helpful example of how we could do it. Because the way that Latter-day Saints look at scriptures is a prime example of confirmation bias in my opinion. We read and study the same stories and verses over and over in the same ways for years.
Until it becomes really hard for us to see or think of anything new when we approach a text. So like with scriptures, we could approach them thinking, what would be a different way of looking at this? Or like, how do other religions interpret this scripture? Like what would a non-literal reading of this look like? What happens when I shift the character that I identify with?
It’s sort of a way of taking something that we are convinced that we know top to bottom, and then finding something that we didn’t see there before. And I think that this example can apply in each one of the following points, actually. So, I’m gonna throw ‘em in there as we go through these.
CW: Nice.
SH: Also from Nadia Bolz-Weber, she gave such a nice framing of the idea of changing the way that we engage with scriptures. When she says this, “The biblical text, when treated as a living word and not simply a dead policy manual, allows meaning, comfort, and wisdom to unfold in both old and new ways for each community that studies it.
It allows the Bible to surprise us, live in us, even interpret us.”
CW: Oh yeah.
SH: And I think confirmation bias is a thing that happens in our lives that prevents us from engaging with things in that way. Pretty much everything becomes a dead policy manual, right? Your whole algorithm becomes a dead policy manual because you’re not invited into anything living or new.
You’re invited into the same fun house mirror chamber, you know, over and over again every day.
CW: That is exactly why. ‘Cause I was trying to think why do I wanna talk about this? Why do I wanna have an episode on this so badly? And I think you just nailed it. Confirmation bias is just everywhere. It is riddled throughout our LDS lives.
And I can’t think of a better example than like how we approach scripture. I think it’s why we’ve heard so many stories from women when they dared to talk about the Parable of the 10 Virgins from the angle that we presented, so many got pushback.
SH: Oh yeah.
CW: We just can’t do it.
SH: I would say most got pushback. Yeah. We just, we are not equipped to do it.
CW: No. The 10 virgins is about self-reliance period. And we cannot approach it from any other angle.
SH: Right. Right.
CW: And that makes me really sad.
SH: But I feel like the reason I hit on the SS is because I feel like that’s a really, that could be a really healthy, non-threatening
CW: Yes.
SH: Specific way that someone could work on one thing. You know, without it being, without it threatening to upset everything anyway.
CW: Yeah.
SH: Please continue with point number two.
CW: Okay. Number two: Evaluate objectively, try to look at facts without emotion or bias. Okay. This is just crazy because religion is all about… I don’t wanna say all about, but there’s a lot of emotion involved. And so to try to look at something objectively, I think this is, I get that this is really hard stuff we’re talking about. Be aware of emotional responses you have. I mean, if you remember on our shadow work episode, I told the story… gosh, I feel like I’m talking about garments a lot, but I told about how I had this outsized emotional response to seeing a friend in Costco not wearing her garments. And so I finally was like, “Okay, I’m gonna get curious about why am I having this outsized response.”
So anyway, that’s part of evaluating things objectively. And I get that it’s really hard for us to look at our religious identity objectively. So sometimes a tool I’ve used is that sometimes when I’m wrestling with something particularly Mormon to our doctrine, I take my scenario and I kind of change the facts to what if this was happening in Islam or what if the Baptists were wrestling with or the Catholics to kind of increase my object, my objectivity.
For example, if there was like a new story or a scandal that the Baptist church had been hiding their tidying money and shell companies all while. Okay, yeah, I know this is real life example for us anyway if they were hiding money in shell companies or while they were continuing to ask 10% from even the poorest members, I would probably be able to come to a quick conclusion that this was unethical.
SH: right?
CW: And yet when I’ve tried talking about this with numerous family members, they can’t evaluate it objectively. You know, they have all the reasons for why it’s okay for our church to have shell companies.
SH: Yeah. I was thinking about this, how this would apply to my scripture example, and my husband has such a good tool that he uses as a gospel doctrine teacher and has used for years to get people to try to engage objectively with the verse on the page.
And I think it comes from his, you know, background in being an English major. But anyway that is doing a close reading of what the words on the page actually say. You know, maybe use different translations and perhaps going beyond that to find out what the original language said or meant. It’s pretty hard to argue what words on the page say that’s a place where you can meet a subject objectively.
CW: Nice.
SH: If you see what I mean.
CW: Yeah, I do.
SH: So it’s a good place to start to sort of strip your biases and your previous understandings out of it. Let’s see what this actually says.
CW: Maybe that’s what Russ was trying to do when he said to those sweet little missionaries “I need your source.” Well, I mean, I think it was right with what the scriptural example was and oh dear.
SH: Yeah.
CW: Good for him. Okay. Number three, cross reference. Check multiple sources. Actively expose yourself to information and perspectives that challenge your beliefs. Okay, again, this sounds bananas because I think in a one and only true church, we’re really at a huge disadvantage here. I mean, what’s there to crosscheck?
With warnings like that, like when a warning comes from our prophet. And this was, here’s something I’m gonna read from Dallin Oaks that he just said in his February 2026 BYU devotional. And this actually Susan gets back to when we were talking about anti-Mormon lit earlier, because we don’t use that phrase.
But notice what Dallin H. Oaks uses instead. He says, “Remember, to survive spiritually, you will need the constant influence of the Holy Ghost. An abundance of speculation and false information in podcasts and on social media surrounds us. Some may protest or question the truth of church doctrine without knowing or even understanding the fullness of that doctrine.
Don’t be persuaded by false or inaccurate information. Discuss your concerns with faithful, well-informed friends, and always take those concerns to the Lord.”
Yeah. So he’s telling us to not cross reference and check multiple sources.
SH: Right, right.
CW: So this is where I feel like this is really hard for us to actively expose our self to different perspectives and information. ‘Cause he’s saying no, don’t do that.
SH: Well, and it’s not just him. I mean, I think when you go to try to do that, you have to be aware that other members are probably gonna try to keep you from doing it too. Because when you do it, then it challenges their own confirmation bias.
CW: Yes.
SH: And so, even personal opinions that are perceived as dangerous get shut down immediately so that they don’t infect other members.
CW: Right.
SH: It’s like we sort of think that all this stuff is a virus and you could get infected by being someone, being even near someone else who is having these conversations. In my scripture example, I think this could be consulting what scholars from diverse traditions or academic disciplines have said about the story or passage that you’re looking at.
This is why I love having a few different study bibles that you can look in there and see well, what have other people said about this? And it’s amazing to me how sometimes it’s so different from what I grew up understanding about that scripture.
CW: Susan, I’m going to give you and I a gold star for this. For number three, for actively exposing ourselves to different information perspectives.
Because you’re right, we kind of have our favorite biblical scholars that we go to. We’re constantly looking up what Pete Ends or Jared Bias, or Bart Iman. All of these guys were like, let’s hear what they
SH: it’s such fresh air on a topic where there has never been any in my life,
CW: Fresh air. Yeah.
SH: You know, so I love it. Once I started doing it, once I started reading and checking things more widely and looking at different sources, I can’t stop, Cynthia. I won’t stop. I love it.
CW: Gold star Susan – Gold Star. Okay, number four, consider alternative explanations. Ask yourself what else could explain the data.
And I get in religion, we’re not necessarily talking about data, but my life experiences can be the data. So, it’s always great. This is something I’ve harped on for six years on the podcast. I want people to have more curiosity. And it’s always great if we can practice curiosity first, but sometimes that curiosity is forced upon us.
SH: Yes.
CW: To consider alternative explanations. Sarah Bessie in Field Notes. She said, “Sometimes one of the greatest gifts God gives to us is losing our religion. We have to be committed to unlearning the unhelpful, broken, false, or incomplete things if we want to have space to relearn the goodness, joy, and embrace of God. But it sure doesn’t feel like it at the time.”
SH: Preach, Sarah. It’s almost like she knows us, Cynthia.
CW: Well, I think she’s been through a lot of the same things that you and I have been through,
SH: And I think that very often progress in this stuff kind of has to be proceeded by a period of, I don’t know. Like it’s okay to look at something and just say, “I don’t know.”
CW: Yeah.
SH: And then to make a choice to just stay in that space of, “I don’t know,” for a while. If something bumps the table, you don’t have to refill what was spilled immediately. You can just sit there, limit the
CW: space,
SH: right. You can just sit there and look at the mess on the tablecloth and just hang out for a while.
It can be hard to do, though. It can be hard to do. Especially for a person who is used to knowing things.
CW: Yeah.
SH: Which we all are, we’re all used to knowing.
CW: We all are.
SH: Yes. We’re all used to being Right.
CW: We’re all used to being right. And getting back to what we were saying earlier, safety, there’s a lot of safety.
Yeah. So much in being, right?
SH: Yep. Yep.
CW: Okay –Last one. Number five, practice intellectual humility. Embrace uncertainty as an opportunity for growth and learning. We’ve talked about this for years I feel like as well. When encountering new info, ask yourself, what if I’m wrong? The simple question can open the door to deeper exploration and understanding.
Okay. I kind of wanna sum up. Go back to the story about Jackie Lewis getting in the car accident really quickly, because on that same podcast about confirmation bias with Richard Roar and Brian McLaren she pointed out this is really difficult for religious people. So I appreciated that she was, you know, also saying, this is bananas.
This is really hard for us because she said Richard is a Catholic, and Brian as an evangelical and her growing up Baptist, there was a lot to overcome religiously. And she said that when confirmation bias rears its ugly head, she said that we have new info to deal with and there are a couple of ways that we can deal with it, but she posits a third way.
SH: Okay. And
CW: So she said, first we can double down, which we’ve talked about. Second, we can put it on the shelf. But she said the third way is… She said this, “The third thing, the third choice is our contemplative mind, which helps us to step outside of that thought and embrace another. Because of the God thing. Right? The God thing. You and me and Richard as people of faith, we can project those stories, those biases onto God. God has ordained men to lead. God has ordained women to be quiet. God has ordained that white is right, white is powerful. God has ordained straight people. All of that stuff gets stuck in the religion story” she goes on. “So how do we push ourselves to a third space where there’s something else besides squeezing someone in the box?”
And then she closes it by saying “When we quit squeezing people into boxes, then we let God out of the box as well.”
SH: Good stuff.
CW: Sarah Bessie. One more time. She said “Part of what we are invited to learn out here in the wilderness is how to metabolize that loss into compassion rather than bitterness, into welcome rather than caution.”
SH: Cynthia, how many times does this have to come back to control. Everything circles back. It always circles back to control. I’m just thinking of our whole conversation about letting go; hold things lightly.
CW: Susan, yes.
SH: Hold things lightly. That includes everything that we know, our thoughts, our desires, like all the stuff that we can control, and of course everything we can’t control.
Stop holding it so tightly. Wow, if I could learn that one rule I feel like that would be like a third way of approaching my life. I feel like that’s what Jackie Lewis is talking about is like,
CW: I think so
SH: a whole way of approaching. She’s putting it in the context of God. But when I step back from that and I just look at my life, man, loosen up.
When I put it in the context of the scripture example, it really makes me laugh to even think of holding scriptural meanings lightly. Can you imagine? I feel like that is the total opposite.
CW: I wanna hear that general conference talk, Susan.
SH: Total opposite of the way that I feel like I was taught to engage with scripture.
What would that even look like? And yet, what might we be able to find in a text as rich as the Bible if we were willing to hold it lightly? To be a dance partner with it? As Rob Bell would say. I mean, that’s just like a whole different thing and it would be like opening up a whole library of possible meanings and riches in that text.
CW: Okay. We’re out of time. We had a few more things to say, but I just want to close this topic of confirmation bias with a prayer from Nadia Bolz-Weber. I actually think it goes on, it goes really well with our last point about holding things lightly and about practicing intellectual humility.
SH: Awesome.
CW: And this is from a sermon called Seeing More than Just What We Look For. She says this, “God of desert prophets, and unlikely Messiahs. Help us set aside our pride enough to see how little we really know. Humble us, and then raise us up as agents of your peace. Show us that there is more to see than what we look for.
More possibility, more love, more forgiveness. When we look upon those we consider enemies, help us see them as your children loved madly by you. Help others who view us as their enemies, to also see us as your beloved children. Heal this nation. Heal the people in this room. Lord, restore our sight so that we may see you in each other.
We’re not going to bother asking politely because we are basically out of other options. Show yourself Lord, and if you are already doing that and we are too blind to see, then grant us even bad vision, since even that would be a vast improvement. We ask all of this and that for which we have no words and the name of Jesus Christ, friend of sinners of every variety.
Amen.
SH: Amen and amen.
CW: Great prayer. Beautiful.
SH: Yeah. Thank you, Cynthia.
CW: Thank you Susan.
Voicemail 1: Hi Cynthia and Susan. I wanted to thank you so much for your recent episode about Purity Culture with C.A. Larson. In the episode, you had all wondered if sexuality is still discussed the same way in church lessons to young women as it was when you were going through the young women’s programs. I can’t speak for everyone, but my family lives in Los Angeles and I have a 15-year-old daughter who has now had the chastity lesson twice in her young women’s and both of those lessons were very positive.
They talked about sexuality in a really positive way and as an important part of humanity and being a healthy human being. And I’m so grateful that she’s had positive experiences at church. However, for those lessons, I was the member of the young women’s presidency, [01:15:00] so I was able to give input and advice as to how we were approaching those lessons.
And I also recognize that living in LA this is a really open-minded community and we’re probably giving far more positive lessons than the majority of wards in the US or in the world. So I just wanted to share a little bit of advice. I do believe that if an adult is going to be speaking to my child about sexuality, they should be able to talk to me about sexuality first. And I think it is fairly within your rights as a parent to email or text your child’s youth leaders and say, “Hey, I know that the topic of chastity is going to come up in church. I would love to know how you plan on approaching this when teaching it to my child and to the other youth.”
Voicemail 2: Hey Cynthia and Susan, this is Taylor and I love your podcast so much.
I just listened to the episode about piety and I’ve also been recently thinking about the book called You Are Special, where all the little Wims have stars or dots thrown at them. And I can’t help but think of this outward appearance of piety as it pertains to the story where we are collecting the stars and we are kind of programmed to be Wims in the system of star collecting and dot collecting. And I honestly feel like I’ve really profited from this system. I’ve been quite the star collector in my life. And now I just reject all of it. I reject the system. I would love to just be the girl puppet at the end and none of the stickers stick to her.
And when you were talking about having piety lose its currency, I could just visualize that little puppet girl when the stickers stopped sticking to her.
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