What is Confirmation Bias?

Confirmation bias is a tendency to consider information that confirms what you already believe and that doesn’t challenge it. The American Psychological Association defines it this way:

“the tendency to gather evidence that confirms preexisting expectations, typically by emphasizing or pursuing supporting evidence while dismissing or failing to seek contradictory evidence.”

Numerous experimental studies in social psychology have shown confirmation bias to be a common psychological bias, like attribution bias or the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Here’s an example. Suppose you hear about inflation in the US economy. You notice that there are two positions about it:

1. Inflation is transitory due to the COVID pandemic;
2. Inflation is already here and ramping.

Suppose that you are going to believe one of the two claims. If you are like most people, you have a tendency to favor information that confirms what you already believe and that doesn’t challenge it.

One option is to seek pieces of information that confirm that inflation is transitory. You go to your browser and type, “Is inflation transitory due to the COVID pandemic?” and then you go on to read many sources that agree that inflation is transitory due to the COVID pandemic. You continue seeking more…