Have you ever stopped to think about where your opinions and beliefs come from? If you are like most people, you probably imagine that your convictions are the result of years of experience and objective analysis of the information you have received. The reality is that we all make a very common mistake that goes completely unnoticed and is called confirmation bias.

Although we like to imagine that our opinions are rational, logical and objective, this is not quite the truth. Many of our ideas are based on the fact that we selectively pay attention to information that is in accordance with our ideas. In view of this, we unconsciously ignore that which is not in line with our way of thinking.

What is confirmation bias?

Confirmation bias is one of the cognitive biases that behavioral finance studies. It is also known as selective evidence gathering.

In other words, you carelessly look for information that confirms your beliefs and opinions and discard those that don't. This behavior also affects the data you remember and the credibility you give to the information you read.

Where does the confirmation bias come from?

It was psychologist Peter Wason who discovered this effect in the 1960's. Although it has been called the Wason effect, he himself named it "confirmation bias.

In an experiment entitled" On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task", he first recorded the tendency of the human mind to interpret information selectively. He later confirmed it in other tests, as published in" Reasoning about a Rule".

Examples of confirmation bias

The best example of confirmation bias is the news you read, the blogs you visit and the forums you interact with. If you stop to analyze them carefully, it is easy that they all have a specific ideology that is quite similar or that they deal with some issues more assiduously than others.

Moreover, your own brain will be responsible for diverting your attention to these news and comments, ignoring those that are different.

This cognitive bias alters the way you process information and can lead you to make wrong decisions in many areas of your life.

Information search tampering

Confirmation bias adulterates the way you search for information Moreover, it influences the way you interpret data, the way you remember it, and even your retention of memories.

It is easy that on social networks you only look at those people who post funny things, but ignore other messages and don't even take into account those who haven't posted anything. This happens especially at times when you spend a lot of time on the Internet trying to find out if your friends and contacts have more fun than you do.

Similarly, if after a game you are asked who committed more fouls or who got the ball more, you will certainly use the opposing team to talk about fouls and your team to talk about possession. This also makes a team with a bad reputation always the one that commits more fouls in your head. This is how you alter or interpret your memories, always based on yourconcordance.

Dangers of confirmation bias

We tend to prejudice

Bias consists of a prior judgment that is made before knowing something firsthand. If we think that men drive better than women, we will be more aware of a woman's actions behind the wheel than a man's.

It is also prejudice that leads a person to believe that fouls in soccer, as we have already said, are always truer when committed by the opposing team. Also, because of prejudice, we end up devaluing societies and communities that are different from ours. As you can see, prejudice is a very negative effect of confirmation bias.

We misjudge people

Truth be told: we judge as more intelligent and trustworthy those people who have the same beliefs and values as we do. We also consider them to have higher morals and greater integrity than others.

In politics, if we defend a party, we judge the politicians who represent it more leniently if they are wrong. Moreover, we tend to believe that they are somehow better people than their opponents. The same goes when we talk about different religious beliefs.

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We have selective memories

Our memories are also affected by this bias. So we tend to remember the data from the past that are better for us, those that in some way benefit our stories and that reaffirm us positively in the present. This is why no two people ever remember the same event in the same way. Memories are tremendously subjective.

How to avoid confirmation bias

Avoiding confirmation bias is not easy. The best formula for limiting its influence is to try to analyze your decisions and the information you read as objectively as possible. A good strategy is to pay attention especially to opinions that are contrary to your own.

It is worth saying that confirmation bias is a defense mechanism of our brain. It only exists because human beings have a tendency to hate being wrong or losing an argument. Even when this happens, areas associated with physical pain are activated in our brain.

Surrounding yourself with people with different opinions than yours is an excellent way to cultivate your critical thinking, because you get used to not ignoring thoughts that don't fit your beliefs.

Final considerations

As we can see, the confirmation bias It instinctively leads us to overestimate the value of information that corresponds to our beliefs, expectations and assumptions, which are often misleading. Furthermore, it causes us to underestimate and even ignore information that does not correspond to what we think or believe.

This confirmation bias greatly influences decision making, because if we have a strong belief about what we want to do, we tend to rule out all the alternatives that are available to us. This is because confirmation bias is a filter through which we see a reality that fits our expectations. Thus, it makes us ignore many different ways of seeing the world.

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