Why people believe in Fake News? — Confirmation Bias & ways to overcome it.
This article is written for “Decision Psychology” class assignment at the University of Montpellier.
Imagine that you have tried to reach a friend with whom you have an ambivalent relationship by phone or email, leaving messages, yet receiving no call in return. In a situation like this, it is easy to jump to conclusions in an intuitive manner that your friend wants to avoid you. The danger, of course, is that you leave this belief unchecked and start to act as though it were true.
Confirmation bias occurs from the direct influence of desire on beliefs. When people would like a certain idea or concept to be true, they end up believing it to be true. They are motivated by wishful thinking. This error leads the individual to stop gathering information when the evidence gathered so far confirms the views or prejudices one would like to be true.
Once we have formed a view, we embrace information that confirms that view while ignoring, or rejecting, information that casts doubt on it. Confirmation bias suggests that we don’t perceive circumstances objectively. We pick out those bits of data that make us feel good because they confirm our prejudices. Thus, we may become prisoners of our assumptions.
As a result of that bias, we’ve always chosen the media that conforms to our address and read newspapers or magazines that in some way reflect what we are interested in and who we want to be. But the age of algorithimically mediated media is really different in a couple of ways. One way is it’s not something we know that we are choosing. So we dont know on what basis, who an algorithm thinks we are and therefore we dont know how it is deciding what to show us or not to show us. And it’s often that not showing us part that’s the most important — we dont know what piece of the picture we are missing because by definiton it’s out of view. Another feature is that it is automatic and it’s not something that we’re choosing. When you pick up a left wing magazine or a right wing magazine we know what the bias is, what to expect.
All these choices that made by our individual choices, with our “confirmation bias” create filter bubble for us which is a state of intellectual isolation that allegedly can result from personalized searches when a website algorithm selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information about the user, such as location, past click-behavior and search history. Obviously, in the end, it makes ultimately hard for us to understand what is going in the world outside of our filter bubble.
Another example for the confirmation bias is the “controversial” climate change discussions. We always have facts, but people decide which facts they want to listen to, which facts they want to take and change their opinions, and which they want to disregard. One of the reasons for this is when something does not conform to what I already believe, what people tend to do is either disregard it or rationalize it away; because information doesn’t take into account what makes us human, which is our emotions, our desires and our priour beliefs. In a study for opinions on climate change, scientists asked people, “do you believe in man-made climate change?” and based on the answers they divided them into the strong believers and the weak believers. Then they gave them the information. For some people they said that scientists have reevaluated the data and now conclude that the things are actually much worse than they thought before, that temperature would rise by 7 degrees to 10 degrees. For other people they said the scientists have reevaluated the data and now they believe that actually situation is not as bad as they thought, it’s much better, and the rise in temperature would be quite small. And what they found is that people who did not believe in climate change, when they heard the scientists are saying, “actually it is not that bad’’, they changed their beliefs even more in that direction, so they became more extremist in that direction, when they did hear that the scientists thinks it is much worse, they didn’t nudge. The same happened with the opposite direction, when they heared that climate change is getting worse, they changed their beliefs much more in that direction. But when scientists said it is not that bad, they did not nudge much. So the result of giving same information to the people was that, they were much more polarized.
“Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.”
― George Orwell
All these examples prove why people have a tendency to fail into fake news. Their opinions, individual choices, filter bubbles, beliefs — basically, confirmation bias make them to get much deeper in their beliefs, and create deeper bubbles. And it happens to all of us. But can we avoid that bias? How can we overcome it? There are 3 steps we can use. First is to recognize. Recognize that you have this bias in the first place. We all do. If you already read this blog post that much, you can check that off. Second step is consider. Consider that you may not really understand what you think you understand. Researchers call it the illusion of explanatory depth. Let’s say i strongly believe that GMOs are bad for me. If someone forces me to explain it, I just might realize that I don’t understand it as well as I thought I did. Now, I might be less confident in my belief and more receptive to another point of view. Third step is research. Research and breakdown the opposing viewpoint. You may realize that your understanding of where they are coming from is a bit too shallow. So now you know the perils of confirmation bias and have tools to overcome it. From now, I hope you will always try to be on the right side, not with your beliefs, with your facts.
