Confirmation Bias

Tendency to pay more attention to sources of information that agree with one's current belief. This can lead to unjustified confidence in one's preconceptions and the avoidance of contrary arguments, with the result that one's belief is based on an unbalanced selection of information. This increases the risk that one's belief could be incorrect.

Components.

Related Engine Processes.

Further reading.

• a.k.a. 'echo chamber', 'group-think'. Solution: seek cognitive diversity [where does the solution go; ie, which engine process? open-mindedness (learning)?]
• eg, following news services, blogs, books, etc that share your attitude towards issues (political parties, environment, etc).
• open-mindedness qv: follow sources that espouse the opposite views to yours. You may not agree, but it would be a good exercise to work out the flaws in the opposing arguments.
• We can learn more from people who think differently to ourselves than from those who think similarly to ourselves.
• c.f. familiarity bias q.v.
• c.f. risk-factor-misjudgement q.v.: can confirmation-bias qv, familiarity-bias qv, etc, be merged into risk-factor-misjudgement qv?
• Link to open-mindedness qv, which is the perfect antidote to confirmation-bias.
• culture, society
• Can reinforce intuition qv errors; eg, superstition