up:: Tags:: #🌲 # Confirmation bias The the psychological bias that makes us seek out, consume, and interpret information that validates our already held beliefs in a confirming fashion. In other words, if we believe something we tend to look for and overvalue confirmatory evidence. But if we don't believe something we tend to look for and overvalue disconfirming evidence. Rather than ignoring contradictory information to our beliefs, we tend to pay special attention to it, and than skew it to fit more with our beliefs or support the other sides argument less well. When looking for information to answer a question we generally look for confirming evidence rather than disconfirming evidence. This is despite the fact that disconfirming evidence is just as informative if not more so than positive evidence. Disconfirming evidence *proves* something is not the case. Confirming evidence can only make it more likely something is the case. As Nassim Nicholas Talleb describes in [[The Black Swan]], knowing there are 1,000,000 white swans would still not be enough to prove the hypothesis black swans don't exist. But a single disconfirming black swan sighted would prove they do. This has a fascinating implication: the relationship we see between two entities can be changed from the framing of a question (see: [[Framing effect]]). The solution is to define what would count as support for your beliefs *beforehand*. However, confirmation bias doesn’t have to be negative like in the case where we are looking for evidence of a commonly known fact. But most of the time it is negative. Luckily there are ways [[How can we fight confirmation bias|we can fight confirmation bias]]. The unconscious version of confirmatory bias is the [[Priming effect]]. Related: [[Our first impressions can be prone to confirmation bias]] [[Cards/Selective perception]] [[Selective evaluation]] [[We tend to skew information we consume to fit with our already preconceived beliefs]]