How Confirmation Bias is Ruining Your Life (and How to Fix It)

“We see the world through our own rose-tinted glasses, only allowing what we want to see to take hold in our minds. Everything else gets filtered out, everything that doesn’t fit into our world view”

Now, more than ever we live in a world where we can select what we see, what we hear, what we experience. We ignore information that does not neatly fit into our world view and we see patterns around us that confirm our beliefs: confirmation bias.

Confirmation Bias is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories and thus reject any other evidence to the contrary.

This is a major problem is society today because it prevents any actual discourse among opposing viewpoints, and it only serves to reinforce the pre-existing beliefs of a group. We see this in news media, social media, and even amongst our social circles. Now that we are wrapped up in our own echo chambers our own biases are becoming more and more pronounced, which has now led us to this point in history: where extreme ideologies on the left and the right compete for our attention.

Confirmation Bias leads to 4 main effects:

Attitude Polarization:

Disagreements among different parties become more polarized by the same set of evidence. Ex: looking at the Trump presidency in the first 6 months, two parties come to different conclusions: one believes Trump is doing great and the other believes Trump is doing poorly, all based on the same evidence.

Belief Perseverance:

The tendency to hold on to a belief even if that belief is proven false. Any contradictory evidence is discredited. This type of bias occurs in many conspiracy theories, such as the 9/11 conspiracy or the Barack Obama birth certificate conspiracy.

Primacy Effect:

The first items presented in a series are the most likely to be remembered and influential. That factoid you heard on a podcast sticks in your head and you conflate its importance with its primacy.

Illusory Correlation:

Perceiving a relationship between two variables or events that have no connection. The false association between one group of people and a negative trait. Ex: a student fails an exam given on a Monday so they determine that they are unlucky and unable to pass a test if it is administered on future Mondays.

What to do about Confirmation Bias

This warped reality only makes our polarized political/social situation even worse. Every news item is interpreted and regurgitated on a biased media site or someone’s biased social media post, again and again and again. We continue to see the 4 main effects occur on constant basis.

We continue to see a society where our lives are ruled by our own inherent biases, which have become so internalized that it prevents most from seeing the bigger picture. It leads to ignorance and closed-mindedness, robbing people of a vital aspect of life: critical thinking and analyzation of the truth.

While it is difficult to ascertain any type of truth or even define the term in a way that can please everyone, the fact of the matter is that confirmation bias is a prevalent force in the modern world and people would be better off if they were able to understand and analyze their own biases. Our minds have the tendency to make patters out of nothing, so it is all too easy to allow our thoughts to become clouded and illogical.

I’m not saying that everyone should hold hands and be happy together all the time, but critically analyzing one’s own biases is vital to social life. Therein lies the “truth,” that being the critical thought required to deeply look at one’s self. It is not easy to admit your own confirmation bias and how that bias has informed your viewpoint but I believe such actions are essential.

So, the next time you see something that offends your sensibilities or seeming confirms a theory of yours, think for a moment of your own bias and how it is impacting how you feel.

Just take a few moments and break apart the situation for what it is, not what you think it should be. Our minds are adept at making patterns out of nothing and most of our warped thoughts connect seemingly disparate events.

It’s only after you’ve stepped away from your own bias and ego that you can see the situation for what it is, and that is an essential part of human existence.