How confirmation bias works, and how to get around it
🧠Welcome back to Cognitive Bias Week, where we’re going deep on all the ways humans misperceive reality
Issue #150: behind the scenes at the DNC and why designers should read sci-fi
By Harris Sockel
Yesterday, I (with the help of my colleague Buster Benson) introduced the four big hairy conundrums of the universe that force our brains to take shortcuts. Today, we’re zooming in on what might be the most problematic: There’s too much information in the world, so we have to be selective about what we see and hear.
Enter: Confirmation bias.
“Consider how common smoking in public places like airplanes and restaurants was just 20–30 years ago,” once wrote product designer Anton Sten on Medium. Until around 1956, doctors accepted the results of shoddy studies confirming their existing beliefs that tobacco was a cure-all. Tobacco companies also lobbied researchers to dismiss contrarian evidence, leading to motivated reasoning (not a cognitive bias itself but fuel for all of them).
Counterintuitively, confirmation bias — our tendency to see and hear info that reinforces what we already believe — is actually adaptive for us because it’s efficient. In a world full of infinite information, re-examing everything you think you know is pretty tedious!
Confirmation bias is also one of the reasons why, as the pseudonymous philosopher known as Argumentative Penguin wrote a few months back, facts don’t change minds the way friendships can. This is especially true in politics. Belonging is a powerful urge; it’s one of the only forces that can overpower confirmation bias. You’re more likely to change your mind about, say, who to vote for, when speaking with someone you agree with on most topics (i.e., you feel like you belong with them) than with someone you disagree with on almost everything.
TLDR: Countering confirmation bias is a slow process, and you can’t do it alone. In the words of Argumentative Penguin, “Many of the things humans hold to be true in the present, they were initially skeptical about. It’s a slow boil.”
⚡ Lightning round: great, recent Medium stories in one sentence or less
- Fiction-writer-turned-UX-writer Daley Wilhelm explains why all designers should read sci-fi: “To anticipate the needs of users of the future, you need to imagine the future.”
- YouTuber and reporter Isaac Saul takes us behind the scenes at the DNC, where select TikTokers and YouTubers were given private lounges and VIP access while print journalists were “stuffed into nosebleed seats,” a sign of these media times.
- Paul Yee time-travels back to his stint at The Gap, where he worked as a business planner in corporate HQ for eight years and learned that fashion is a fascinating blend of art and science (trend-chasing and mining data for insights).
Your daily dose of practical wisdom: enjoy it more
Fantasy author Laini Taylor explains how she taught herself to write without a goal in mind, which led to cooler, weirder, deeper, and truer stories (and a book of supernatural love stories shortlisted for a National Book Award):
I want to be clear that my hopes were modest: Write more. Enjoy it more. That’s it. There was no voice in the back of my head whispering, “Play your cards right and this could lead to books that will change your life.” If there had been, that would have killed it.
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com
