12 Confirmation Bias

While looking for information that fits your needs, you have to pay attention to not only the information you are reading but also what is going on in your own mind.

That’s because one of the things that can get in the way of identifying biased information is our own biases. Sometimes the things that look most correct to us are the ones that play to our own biases. That impulse that we all can get to find and take in information that coincides with what we already think is called confirmation bias.

Some steps you can take to avoid confirmation bias are:

• Avoid asking questions that imply a certain answer. If you ask, “Did the Holocaust happen?,” for example, it is implied that the Holocaust was faked. If you want information on the Holocaust, sometimes it’s better just to start with a simple noun search, e.g. “Holocaust,” and read summaries that show how we know what happened.
• Avoid using terms that imply a certain answer. As an example, if you query, “Women 72 cents on the dollar” you’ll likely get articles that tell you women make 72 cents on the dollar. But if you search for “Women 80 cents on the dollar” you’ll get articles that say women make 80 cents on the dollar. Searching for general articles on the “wage gap”  might be a better choice.
• Avoid culturally loaded terms. As an example, the term “black-on-white crime” is a term used by white supremacist groups, but is not a term generally used by sociologists, nor do statistics support this claim. As such, if you put that term into the Google search bar, you are going to get some sites that will carry the perspective of white supremacist sites, and be lousy sources of serious sociological analysis.

Sources

This section includes material from the source chapter, Confirmation Bias by Mike Caulfield and Kristin Conlin, found in Strategic Information Literacy, licensed as  CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, as well as the following:

Image: “work flow” by Christin Hume under free to use Unsplash License