Conformation Bias: what it is and how to avoid it

The internet has transformed how the people of the world go about doing pretty much anything. Its changed the way people watch T.V. and movies with streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and Sling T.V. Its changed the way we listen to music with internet radio like Pandora and Spotify. The internet has even changed the way people date with websites like Tinder and Match.com, but perhaps the most important thing that has changed is the way people get their news.

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According to the Pew Research Center, 38% of people who regularly get news get their information from social media, websites, and apps, 50% of those people being between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine. With the internet being such an open place with so much information to fact check, it can be easy for false information to be spread quickly through some of these websites like twitter and Facebook without being challenged. A big reason that this “fake news” seems to appear so believable is not by chance, it is by design, that design being conformation bias.

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When I was younger my parents would accuse me of selective hearing, only listening to what they said when it was something I liked and ignoring them when it was something I didn’t; in fact my girlfriend claims I still do this. Confirmation bias is kind of the media equivalent off the same phenomena, it is when we find some news story or lean some fact that confirms our current beliefs and we accept it as truth without question. We are all guilty of this to some degree. I for example found myself sharing a picture on Facebook during the 2016 election that quoted then presidential candidate Donald Trump

saying that republican voters were dumb. Without a second thought I pressed the share button

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thinking that “there’s no way he did not say this, that sounds like something he would say, it's on Facebook it has to be true”. It did not take long for my friends on Facebook to tell me that this was not true and that this fake picture had fooled a great many people on the internet.

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If you are going to take the effort to be an informed member of your society, you owe it to that society and to yourself to make sure that you are not being fooled by those in the media that would like to take advantage of you. Luckily there are many ways to confront and mitigate the effect that confirmation bias has on you, the first step is acknowledging your biases. For example, if you are a dog lover and you find an article telling you that owning a cat may make you more likely to develop cancer, you should hold off on believing to much of what is in that article and do some fact checking. There are a whole host of websites you can use to fact check stories you see both on the internet and the news on television, websites like Snopes.com and Politifact.com are all great resources that you can use to find out if you suspect what you are seeing reported is false.Another way you combat confirmation bias in your life is to add variety to where you get your news. If you find yourself leaning toward the left politically, it may do you some good to check into fox news, and other sources like them,every once and a while just to give you a sense of the whole picture.

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What I am asking you to do is not easy. It is hard to take that extra step to go outside of your comfort zone just to disprove something you wanted so desperately to believe. It is not easy to listen to people you

fundamentally disagree with, and to learn to take that extra second to check your own desire to be right. However if you are not going to take that extra step to verify what you read and what you share you are not solving the problem, you’re making it worse, and you owe it to your community and to yourself to make sure that what you decide to believe and share with others is the truth.