What is "Confirmation Bias"?
In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias (or confirmatory bias) is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, leading to statistical errors.
Confirmation bias is a phenomenon wherein decision makers have been shown to actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms their hypothesis, and ignore or underweigh evidence that could disconfirm their hypothesis.
Fortunately this sort of thing does not exist in political discussions here on NT!
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Confirmation bias , also called confirmatory bias or myside bias , [Note 1] is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs
The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs.
Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence.
Poor decisions due to these biases have been found in political and organizational contexts
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Personality traits influence and interact with biased search processes
An experiment examined the extent to which individuals could refute arguments that contradicted their personal beliefs.
People with high confidence levels more readily seek out contradictory information to their personal position to form an argument.
Individuals with low confidence levels do not seek out contradictory information and prefer information that supports their personal position