Confirmation Bias

What is Confirmation Bias in Simple Terms?

Confirmation bias is the practice of favoring information that confirms our existing beliefs while discarding anything that challenges them.

Confirmation Bias in Real Life

1. Reading news exclusively from sources that align with our existing beliefs, while ignoring everything else.
2. Deciding you dislike someone and then interpreting everything they do in a negative light, even neutral actions.
3. Believing that a policy you voted for is working properly, and only remembering the success stories while forgetting the cases where it failed.
4. A sports fan who believes their team was treated unfairly notices every bad referee call made against them, while overlooking the ones that went in their favor.
5. Judges who become convinced early on that a suspect is guilty, may unconsciously focus on evidence that supports that conclusion and overlook evidence that points elsewhere.
6. People tend to remember historical events in a way that glorifies their own culture or nation, while minimizing or forgetting uncomfortable truths.
7. Holding a stereotype about a group and noticing every person from that group who fits it, while ignoring the many who do not.
8. Individuals who believe in astrology tend to remember and cite as proof the times when predictions were accurate, while ignoring every instance in which those predictions proved to be wrong.
9. Conspiracy theory believers actively seek out information that supports their theory and dismiss all contradicting evidence.

Conclusion

We tend to accept information that aligns with what we already believe. Being aware of confirmation bias can help us become more fair and accurate in our judgments, both as individuals and as a society.