What Is Confirmation Bias? | Psychological Explanation & Examples

hello everyone have you ever met someone that was so aggravating so stubborn and so out of touch with reality that they refused to look at objective factual information that disproved their point of view has that person ever been you in today's video we will be talking about a popular cognitive bias called confirmation bias that explains why it seems like sometimes we are living in a different reality from those around us so what is confirmation bias confirmation bias is when people only look for and see information that confirms their own beliefs for example let's say that

i strongly believe that eating a bag of chocolate every day is good for me i will look for every piece of information that proves my belief that eating a bag of chocolate every day is good for me while ignoring all of the information that disproves my idea this can get especially tense with someone who does not believe that eating a bag of chocolate every day is good for me you can probably see where this is going and you've probably been in this situation where you're not arguing about a bag of chocolate but something a lot

more heated so why does this happen well it turns out that this is a result of our brains looking for more efficient ways to interpret information our brain looks at reality in a certain way and filters all information through that worldview it is much easier to keep our current worldview than to keep changing it when new facts come along so our brains have a bias towards maintaining what we already know and not shaking things up too much as that makes it slower and more difficult to process information the problem with this obviously is many times

we ignore information that doesn't confirm what we already know in order to maintain our current world view topics and beliefs that have a lot of emotion behind them can make people more prone to confirmation bias especially if they identify with them so where can you find this in real life well everywhere you look really but what i find really interesting about this concept is that it can be so blatant for example two people can look at the exact same piece of information and interpret it in different ways it's not just the concept that we ignore

information that doesn't prove our beliefs it's also the concept that we interpret information in a way that will prove our beliefs as a more optimistic side note confirmation bias also helps us with enjoying music because we have a preconceived notion of how the beats and melodies will go and then get rewarded when we can successfully predict them we are humans and as humans we will always have imperfect information this is why we are also irrational and biased creatures the best we can do is be aware of the biases that we are victims to so that

we can try to avoid them thanks for watching and i'll see you next time