Confirmation Bias and the Scripture Reading (Mark 1:29-39 and 40-45)

We love stories that please us. We prefer stories that suits our own wants.

Empirically, we are known for our tendency to pay more attention to what appears desirable to our own desires and perceptions, while often ignoring or paying less attention to what is not so appealing.  In social psychology, this phenomena, which compromises our  to perceive and recognize objects objectively, is called “confirmation bias” (Nickerson, 1998)* or “myside bias”(Perkins, 1985)**.

We are not immune from this psychological phenomena – bias – even when we read the scriptures.

This year (2015, Year B),  on the 4^th Sunday, the 5^th Sunday, and the 6^th Sunday, we are reading Markan Gospel narratives of Jesus’ teaching and healing with the divine authority (Mark 1:21-18; 29-39; and 40-45), before Lent.  Out of these readings, the Gospel readings for the 5^th Sunday (Mark 1:29-39) and for the 6^th Sunday (Mark 1:40-45) come with two themes.

For Mark 1:29-39, the one theme is that Jesus healed Simon’s (Peter’s) mother-in-law and many others who were sick, and the other them is that Jesus took time and prayed alone.  As I indicated in my 2-9-15 blog article, “Sustaining Psychospiritual and Physical Health, Preventing Burnout - A Lesson from Jesus and St. Ignatius of Loyola”,  we tend to focus on Jesus’ astonishing healing power and let our amazement blind us to another fact that Jesus was not all about amazing acts of healing and teaching but he took time and prayed.  I explained that Jesus practiced the motto of “ora et labora” (prayer and work), echoing the Ignatian spiritual teaching of the balance between action and contemplation.

When I surveyed some Catholics coming out of Mass on the 4^th Sunday, asking them about their impressions on the Gospel reading (Mark 1:29-39), everyone I asked mentioned Jesus’ healing power and miracles but hardly mentioned the fact that Jesus prayed. This gives an impression that most people who heard the Gospel narrative only remember the Jesus’ healing acts but do not recall Jesus’ quiet prayer so well.

In the afore-mentioned blog article, I linked this to today’s rather epidemic problem of minister burnout, as this problem can be attributed to overwork with a lack of prayer.  This problematic phenomena of minister burnout can also be understood as an indication of ministers’ confirmation bias, which pays attention only to the healing acts of Jesus (vv. 29-34) but less attention to the quiet prayer of Jesus (vv. 35-39).

In fact, this kind of confirmation bias problem was also observed as I surveyed some Catholics coming out of Mass on the 5^th Sunday, asking about their impressions on the Gospel reading (Mark 1:40-45).

Everyone I asked spoke how a leper asked Jesus to cure him and how Jesus did. Only one person added the fact that Jesus also asked the leper to show his cured figure to the priest so that he could verify Jesus’ power according to the law (Leviticus 13) (vv. 40-44).  But, no one could recall how Jesus ended up being kept out of the crowd (v 45).

As in the case with Mark 1:29-39, the 5^th Sunday Gospel reading, also with Mark 1:40-45, the 6^th Sunday Gospel reading, people who read and heard a homily on this Gospel narrative only remember amazing action of Jesus  but cannot recall the fact that Jesus turned into an excluded person.

As a psychologist, I found this phenomena to be quite interesting, observing confirmation bias in churchgoers’ attention pattern to the Liturgy of the Word, which includes the scripture readings and homily.

My observation indicates that our confirmation bias subconsciously influences more attention to be put on positive action-oriented stories, such as Jesus’ amazing teaching and healing, while leaving less or no attention to stories of Jesus being  away from crowds, for his private prayer (Mark 1:35-39)and for being kept away (Mark 1:45). Our attention and memory retention of the content of the Gospel narratives are better over descriptions of Jesus astonishing the crowds with his actions, compared to descriptions of Jesus being invisible from the crowds.  It seems that our confirmation bias toward the Gospel narratives follows Jesus’ visibility in the crowds.

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*Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises, Review of General Psychology 1998, 2(2), 175-220

**Perkins, D. N. (1985). Postprimary education has little impact on informal reasoning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 77, 562–571.