One of the most horse-whipped themes in the world of fly fishing pertains to fish perception. What colors do they see? How well do they hear? Can they smell the corn dog on my fingers? Do they remember things or feel pain? How do they know?
As important and good as it is to understand this stuff, equally valuable, but utterly missing from the conversation is the other half of the equation. What about the perception of the animal on the other end of the line? Stand up to the closest mirror and prepare to deny everything I am about to say.
Many of our beliefs about fishing are contrived, if not flat-out fictitious. As they say, don’t believe everything you know and certainly don’t believe your lying eyes. We are so engaged within our own belief “system” that our brains will twist facts to fit like a malleable key into a comfortable lock, even if that means unlocking and unleashing ignorance when we pretend to be seeking knowledge and enlightenment.
We believe what we want to believe. All of us do this, all of the time . . . even when we are fishing — perhaps especially when we are fishing. It’s in our genes and is possibly why we love to fish so damn much, even when, truth be told, holding a bouncing stick might not be all that compelling. Maybe we simply think we like to fish because we were told we should at a formative age, encouraged and praised when we did, and since then have subconsciously latched onto every nuance that might support and nourish such a belief and confirm our bias. All of which lends credence to the catchphrase, “Take a kid fishing.”
Humans are inherently lazy, and if we do anything better than any other animal, it is our ability to leech off of the other guy. The leeching we do best is at the social and intellectual levels. On the savannas of Africa, we evolved to cooperate enough to gain the advantage of another’s knowledge without putting ourselves at too much physical risk to acquire new knowledge ourselves. In that epoch of itty-bitty information sharing, tribes were built, and shared beliefs were the glue that held tribes intact and upon which religions were constructed. Common language became the passport into the tribe, and a first impression of how well a stranger spoke the language could mean the difference between sharing dinner or becoming dinner. The tribe of fly-fishing shares a common language and holds a common set of beliefs. It matters less that the beliefs are true than that they fortify and verify our belief system.
“Confirmation bias,” defined as “the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories,” has been studied to death over the decades. It is plain that one of the most important aspects of a belief system is the first impression. If, while learning to fish, we are told that using barbless hooks results in reduced hooking mortality, nothing short of an act of God will shake that belief. When presented with five studies demonstrating that barbless hooks have no effect on hooking mortal-
ity and a single study that suggests that barbless hooks promote survival of the released fish, almost to a person, even in the face of better evidence, we will point to the single study that supports our belief in the merit of using barbless hooks. Guilty as charged. Whether it be as profound a debate as global climate change or as trivial a decision as choosing the right dry fly, facts seldom get in the way of the preconceived notions that keep us comfortably ensconced within our tribe.
Stanford University has become a locus for psychological testing, and the results from a multitude of studies regarding confirmation bias are unequivocal. One researcher is quoted as saying “Once formed, impressions are remarkably perseverant.” Another, “Even after the evidence for beliefs have been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs.” On the global scale, we have seen the failure to accept facts rather than our preferred belief result in the fall of Saigon and the invasion of Iraq. Closer to home, we have refused, time and time again, to set the hook because we know that a fish couldn’t possibly have eaten our nymph. It must have been a rock. In our nascent days of drifting a nymph, it usually was a rock, and we are branded with those first impressions. The number-one complaint among trout-fishing guides is the inability to convince their sports to strike on command or set when the indicator gets dunked. In the eyes of the client, seeing isn’t believing when they don’t think a fish could have possibly eaten their fly.
We wear our tribal uniforms proudly and loudly: flat-brimmed hats, vented shirts, flappy khaki pants, sandals, sunburned cheeks, decals on the window, and rod tubes strapped to repurposed kayak racks. Our language is spangled in code. We don’t use “poles,” we cast “rods.” Emergers, duns, tippets, hackle, Charlies, the Adams, head cement, 9-foot 5-weights, and of course the Shimizake shake. Strip, whip, haul, and then double haul. Anyone from outside our tribe walking into a fly shop might as well be visiting a museum of New Guinean sex toys. What do they do with all these things?
Personally, I do not want to go through age-regression therapy to explore and possibly erase my preconceptions. You probably don’t either. We might discover that we don’t naturally love fly fishing quite so much as we imagined and instead take up golf. I don’t particularly care to parse to pieces why I enjoy fly fishing — it’s good enough for me that I simply do. It might behoove all of us, though, to soften up a bit on the hardwiring of our belief systems and attempt to take a fresh look at the things we know. Every fly fisher knows through generations of telling and retelling Izaak Walton’s immortal words of wisdom from The Compleat Angler that using a bright fly on a bright day or a dark fly on a dark day is an excellent starting point from which to begin our fly selection. We know this for a fact, despite the truth that Izaak Walton was misquoted and never said that.
