What is confirmation bias?
“What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.
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When making decisions, looking for evidence confirming our reasoning is normal.
We should do this by thinking critically and with perfect objectivity.
However, even the most intelligent people suffer from what is known as ‘confirmation bias’.
It is a type of cognitive bias.
These are any distortions in your own thinking that are easy to overlook and can lead you to make poor decisions.
The CIA describes them as “…mental errors caused by our simplified information processing strategies.”
We have them because thinking is demanding on the brain and takes time, so we evolved ‘shortcuts’ to help us make decisions that are mostly ‘good enough’.
This is because, for most of human history, life was a risky affair with frequent encounters with danger.
Taking too much time deliberating at length about a course of action might have left us badly injured or even dead.
Confirmation bias occurs when we seek information confirming our opinion instead of treating all information equally.
In other words, we tend to ignore or overlook information that challenges our existing beliefs about something.
In fact, we are twice as likely to look for confirming evidence as opposed to disconfirming evidence.
And in some cases, we will even twist or manipulate the evidence to fit our own narrative; this also explains why we often read newspapers that align with our values.
It’s also why, during an election, people tend to seek out positive information that puts their favoured candidate in a good light.
The media are masters at taking advantage of this psychological flaw to further their interests.
They provide compelling points on a topic to encourage us to formulate an opinion. Any other evidence that might contradict this is usually undermined or not reported.
To help combat confirmation bias, there are two things you can do:
1. Acknowledge it and read/watch things that don’t agree with your opinion to help you have a more balanced one.
2. Sit down with other people who disagree with you. Listening to their argument might just expose a potentially costly flaw in your own.
To learn all about confirmation bias and more, have a look at our Behavioural Economics, or Behavioural Science for Brands courses
