by Sam Culper III
Confirmation bias is one of the biases humans – even intelligence analysts – are prone to make. When we get a hunch, and we convince ourselves that a hunch is a truth, then we’re liable to be making an error resulting from our own confirmation bias.
And here’s an illustration of confirmation bias in action.
On March 11, 2004, Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorists coordinated a massive bombing of the Madrid commuter train system during the morning rush hour, killing 193 people and wounding approximately 1,800. Two latent fingerprints recovered during the investigation on a bag of detonators by the Spanish National Police (SNP) were shared with the FBI through Interpol. When the prints were run through the bureau’s database, it returned 20 possible matches for one of the fingerprints, one of whom was Brandon Mayfield. A former U.S. Army platoon leader, Mayfield was now an attorney specializing in child custody, divorce and immigration law in Portland, Ore. His prints were in the FBI system because of Mayfield’s military service as well as an arrest two decades earlier because of a misunderstanding. The charges were later dropped.
