Why You Are Always Right

Step back a minute and think of all times when you feel you honestly lost a debate, whether it was sports, educational, or even political; when was the last time you actually lost, and you either changed your way of thinking or at least took a better look into why you think that way. For a lot of us, I feel it will be very hard for a lot of us to think about a moment like that, especially if it is such an open-ended question with so many answers like whether abortion should be legal, is democracy the best form of government, and who is the GOAT (It's LeBron by the way)?

If your answer to the above question was I have never lost a debate, you might have confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency to process information by looking for or interpreting information that is consistent with one's existing beliefs. With confirmation bias there are three recognized types of it. The first type of confirmation bias is a biased search for information. This type of confirmation bias explains people's search for evidence in a one-sided way to support their hypotheses or theories. While that might all sound like a mouthful but in all honestly, it is straightforward. What this is essentially saying is when someone is trying to research or look up something that will help with their already pre-existing viewpoint, instead of looking up a question that would invite disagreements, they would style it in a way that the only results that will appear would be from sites that already agree with the same notion as them. An example of this would be if you believe that Star Wars is a better franchise than Star Trek (it is!), then a person trying to confirm this would look up Star Wars as better than Star Trek. A question styled like this would result in an array of sites that would tell you why Star Wars is better, but if you flipped the question, the opposite would be true. I provided some photos to show this example.  

The next type of confirmation bias is biased interpretation. Biased interpretation explains that people interpret evidence with respect to their existing beliefs by typically evaluating confirming evidence differently than evidence that challenges their preconceptions. This type of confirmation is basically when you are looking at information to use for your already preexisting opinions; when you come across sources that contradict your own opinion you are more likely to question everything about it, like who the author is, is the site even credible, and while doing this the convince themselves that the contradicting
evidence is not trustworthy or even credible while on the other side people will take confirming evidence often times at face value and trust it almost immediately. Stanford did a study on this where they gave 48 students two studies; one supported capital punishment, and the other did not. 

When the students finished reading both articles, they both just believed their already preexisting opinions, and when asked about the opposing viewpoint, they considered it inferior to the one with confirming evidence.

The final type of confirmation bias is biased memory.  This is when to confirm their current beliefs, people may remember/recall information selectively.  This type of confirmation bias is very straightforward and, in my opinion, probably the one where people do the most.  It is also more likely for me to remember a fact I really like or agree with me than one that does not. A study was also done on this type of bias where people were shown the profile of a woman named Jane. In this profile, it showed her introverted and extroverted skills. A couple of days later, after they all read her profile, they were asked if Jane would be better suited for a real estate salesperson (extroverted job) or as a research librarian (introverted job). The people that picked sales person more easily recalled all the extroverted traits than they did for the introverted ones, and those that thought she would be a better librarian did the same but with the introverted characteristics.

Through the three types of confirmation bias, one can hopefully identify which one they use often and how to counter it. The problem with confirmation bias today is it is making us as people more polarized and in root with our own opinions. I would say now, with the internet, you can find anyone who agrees with you, and once they start affirming your views, no matter how wrong you are, you will begin to also believe in them more and seek out facts that only support your opinion. Social media knows this and actually use confirmation bias to keep you on the app. Apps like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook use "filter bubbles" software to show you what they think you like or want to see, and most of the time, they are right. Software like this further divides us as people and sort of force people into groups, whether they know it or not.