The human brain isn’t really equipped to process the volume of information that floods it moment-to-moment. Instead, we’ve developed shortcuts that help make sense of all the people, ideas, and thoughts that pass through our consciousness. This is great for mental efficiency because it lightens cognitive load.
But these mental shortcuts also favor our pre-existing beliefs over the new information, generating an unfortunate side effect called confirmation bias. This bias can creep into pretty much everything we do, and gets magnified online where our searches, news, and social connections tend to align with our current belief systems.
This presentation highlights key concepts from our article about how confirmation bias affects our lives. These slides examine how confirmation bias works for and against us, explore some of the ways it can wrap us in ideological bubbles, and then address how we can burst our own bubbles of bias.