What is confirmation bias and how does it affect our decisions?
Although it is difficult for some to accept, humans are biased creatures; it is nearly impossible for humans to be %100 rational because they have emotions. As an average human, you probably want to believe that your convictions and knowledge are the result of years of experience and objective analysis. The truth is that we are all under the influence of an insidious problem known as “confirmation bias.” We would like to think that our convictions are rational, logical and objective, but our convictions are in fact the result of us giving our attention to ideas that support them.
Confirmation bias or confirmation prejudice is a tendency to seek out information that confirms one’s own desires, ideas and convictions; and to ignore counter opinions, while investigating a subject, evaluating a situation, making decisions or even remembering an event that happened in the past. Even if we take into account that every idea has positive and negative features, our mind unconsciously seeks information that confirms our belief. With this information, we want to defend and provide justification for the ideas that we believe in. It is often difficult to accept a different idea on the same subject. This is because we are prejudiced against change and do not easily want to change.
