Why We Should Eat More Butter | The Convenient Confirmation Bias
It’s early morning and the sun is piercing through your eyelids, still closed. You rub your eyes open, turn over and grab your phone off the bedside table. -6:59 am- You quickly unlock it to turn off your alarm before it starts. Through squinting eyes, your thumb moves to open Facebook and before your better judgement kicks in, you’ve already started scrolling.
“Why We Should Eat More Butter” one post blares. And soon you’re watching a two minute video on the health benefits of butter. After eating croissants almost everyday this week, the news is welcome! It would be incredibly convenient if it was true. You now contemplate stopping at the bakery on your way to work. On the subway, you search “health benefits of butter” on Google. Maybe it’s just a hoax, you think. But to your delight, the top 10 results all tout the magical health qualities of butter.
This convenient phenomenon is brought to you by the confirmation bias. As defined by the Encyclopedia Britannica, “(It is) the tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with one’s existing beliefs”. The confirmation bias is predominantly responsible for the sharing and spreading of misinformation. As people, we all have the need to believe and to belong. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported, “Our findings show that users mostly tend to select and share content related to a specific narrative and to ignore the rest. In particular, we show that social homogeneity is the primary driver of content diffusion, and one frequent result is the formation of homogeneous, polarized clusters.” They exemplify these “clusters” as echo chambers.
By searching the affirmative version of your question on Google, you receive affirmative responses. If you search for the negative, you receive the negative.
Facebook and Google are perfect examples of aiding and abetting our confirmation biases. For a seemingly better user experience, they capture our data and use it to provide us with information we will find most relevant. Instead of searching through several pages of search results, we see what we are looking for on the first page. We search for coffee shops and we receive ones closest to us. We search for winter boots and results show your favorite (most frequented or recently visited) company sites. It’s not a coincidence or fate or the only option; it’s Facebook and Google programatically limiting our exposure and choice.
Our confirmation biases follow us daily. They form our perspectives and ultimately affect how we interact with our world. Nir Eyal and Lakshmi Mani highlight this in their Business Insider article, “Your Brain Tries to Hijack Every Decision You Make- But You Can Fight Back”. They articulate how the confirmation bias affects you by: How you seek information; how you interpret the information in front of you; and how you remember things.
Google and Facebook are examples of tools designed without valuing the implications of the confirmation bias. The internet was initially created to produce the freedom of and access to information. Now we are each stuck inside of the echo chambers of our own worlds.
As designers we create products, environments, frameworks, services and interfaces. We design for use, for joy, and for inspiration. We design to improve. And going forward, we must design to expose, to diversify, to mingle, to discuss, and to explore.
What can you do?
If you have reached this point in the article, you have already started to do something. You are now aware the confirmation bias exists. Acknowledge your confirmation biases. Be curious. Ask more questions and then ask the inverse of that question. Ask to understand. Ask people with different perspectives, working with different confirmation biases. Approach every moment with the drive to try to understand why. And lastly ditch your conversation agenda.
