Discover How Social Media Reinforce Confirmation Bias

#LongRead — Discover How Social Media Reinforce Confirmation Bias

Politics, religion, lifestyle, OS, pets and even things as silly as a jam brand: we all have our own opinions, beliefs and preferences.

And that’s perfectly fine, as this is what makes us who we are.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that, to a certain extent, we all suffer from what we call confirmation bias.

According to Wikipedia, confirmation bias is:

the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities.

In his BRILLIANT — we can hardly stress that enough — article for QuartzTobias Rose-Stockwell not only supports that social media broke American democracy: he unveils the information mechanisms that influence the way we think and reinforce our confirmation biases.

Or, as he puts it:

I believe that the way we consume information has literally changed the kind of people we are.

In this long read, you will learn about:

  • The major difference between how we used to get news vs. how we get news now.
  • What the Filter Bubble is.
  • Why our brains cannot distinguish between “big” numbers and “huge” numbers.
  • The importance of facts.
  • How we — as individuals, social media, companies and, to a degree, social media managers — can counterbalance confirmation bias.

Yes, this article is mainly about politics: but the underlying principles described by the author go far beyond the scope of an election and actually apply to many situations, on a daily basis.

It may be our confirmation bias speaking, but we really believe this article is worth reading 😉


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