Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community (PDF) - CIA

FINDINGS
selves, but in articulating those methods for the purpose of testing and validating
them and then testing their effectiveness throughout the community. In the
long view, developing the science of intelligence analysis is easy; what is difficult
is changing the perception of the analytic practitioners and managers
and, in turn, modifying the culture of tradecraft.
Finding: Confirmation Bias, Norms, and Taboos
Organization is key, because it sets up relationships among people
through allocation and control of resources and rewards. It draws
on tactical power to monopolize or parcel out liens and claims, to
channel action into certain pathways while interdicting the flow of
action into others. Some things become possible and likely; others
are rendered unlikely.
Eric Wolf 13
Time constraints affect both the general analytic production cycle and analytic
methodology by contributing to and exacerbating cognitive biases.
Although there are any number of cognitive biases to which the human mind
is susceptible, one in particular became evident during the triangulation phase
and interpretive analysis of the interview and observation data of this study.
The cognitive bias identified most often was confirmation bias, which is the
tendency of individuals to select evidence that supports rather than refutes a
given hypothesis. 14
Although the psychological mechanism by which confirmation bias occurs
is in debate, confirmatory behavior is a consistent finding throughout the
experimental psychology and cognitive science literature. Rather than focus
on the mechanism and nomenclature, the term “confirmation bias” is used in
this work as a description of confirmatory behavior. This behavior was
13
Eric Wolf was an anthropologist who focused on power, social structures, and the third world.
His work on power and the lives of peasants is considered a modern anthropological classic. Eric
Wolf, Pathways of Power.
14
There is a fair amount of disagreement in the psychological literature regarding the mechanism
by which an individual displays confirmatory behavior. Some researchers attribute it to motivational
factors, for example, a desire to maintain respect within a group. Other researchers attribute
it to selectivity factors, an unconscious cognitive selection of data that confirms the current status
quo. Some researchers attribute it to social factors, a subspecies of groupthink (see Irving Janis,
Groupthink). Still others ascribe it to a misapplication of heuristics, whereby an individual learns
a set of rules that solves one problem and then begins using that same set of rules to try to solve
other types of problems. Although the literature is extensive, Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific
Discovery provides a foundation for understanding the issue. Jonathan Evans’ Bias in Human
Reasoning: Causes and Consequences is still a useful and concise summary of the research
related to confirmation bias.
21