Inattentional deafness, confirmation bias and lying

From Introducing "inattentional deafness" - the noisy gorilla that's missed by Christian Jarrett.

Inattentional Blindness and Inattentional Deafness would appear to be kissing cousins with the logical fallacy of confirmation bias.

I am currently involved in a neighorhood project to protect a nature preserve from being converted to a recreational hiking trail against the wishes of the neighbors. The advocacy group who are pushing the agenda appear to neighbors to be blatant liars in how they represent information neighbors have shared with them.

In faciliated sessions where the advocates are facilitators, neighbors will offer up a criticism of the project and the facilitator will record it on the flip chart as a positive comment. A neighbor will meet with an advocate and express opposition to the project and then the advocate will relay the conversation indicating that the neighbor was in support.

This comes across as blatant lying and misrepresentation.

A more charitable view is that the advocates are just so zealous that they suffer from confirmation bias. They are so convinced of the goodness of their project that they are incapable of comprehending alternate perspectives, a suspension of theory of mind. They hear only that which they expect or wish to hear.

What Inattentional Blindness and Inattentional Deafness suggest is that the problem might be even more deeply rooted. That the advocate is so focused on their own weltanschauung that they literally do not hear an alternate argument. It is not that they have heard the alternate argument and have cognitively screened out that which they did not wish to hear. Rather, they simply did not hear what they did not wish to hear.

An intriguing speculation. It goes a little bit against human nature to be quite that charitable but if we wish to think the best of our fellow man, that is one avenue to take.