Blog Post #9 EOTO Terms

EOTO Terms and Concepts

Confirmation bias can be hindering to someone mentally.  Confirmation bias is when someone has a tendency to interpret or only find information that supports their opinion on something.  This can come in any number of different ways but one specific way is looking up evidence about the opinion but only from the side the person is siding with.  Confirmation bias hinders someone's ability to learn and change their mind on a concept.  This is a negative because people then aren't able to evolve their thinking and opinions.  If everyone can't change their opinions then overall as a society the world would not be able to evolve.  

When people encounter confirmation bias in a community nothing can get done.  It is important for people to have conversations and improve off of each other.  Most of the time when we have a conversation with someone we learn something new.  With conversation bias, it is harder to learn something from someone.  With more than one person who runs into confirmation bias then nothing can get done.  How would society even move on and evolve if no one could learn anything from one another?  

Most segments would be affected the same with confirmation bias.  Confirmation bias is something that doesn't happen more or less depending on the type of people, it is simply just a mental thing that can happen to just about anyone.  People who think they are smart/the smartest, deal with confirmation bias a lot more but this doesn’t change the fact that just about anyone can run into this.  If I had to pick one group it would definitely be younger kids as just about all of them (including me) thought they knew everything about everything.  This causes lots of arguments about which car is faster or whatnot with other kids who had confirmation bias too.  

My generation is screwed.  We full-heartedly think we do know the answer to everything and that everyone else doesn't know what they are talking about.  This causes tons of run-ins with confirmation bias in "conversations" if u even call it that at that point.  As stated before with confirmation bias how are people supposed to pruin their ideas and discover better solutions to bigger problems?  What happens when someone thinks they know what they are doing and ends up messing everything up for people just because they wouldn't hear someone else's idea.  Not to get into politics but look at politics these days.  There is no such thing as a civil conversation between a democrat and a republican anymore.  Both sides won't even talk to each other because there is so much confirmation bias it is just stupid.  How are we supposed to run a government where we are operating off of ideas from one side.  Why are we not talking with each other and leaving the confirmation bias at the door so we can find the best solutions out there?  The question was "how might confirmation bias affect you?"; but it should be how might it not.

Sources:

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1218&context=honorstheses#:~:text=It%20was%20predicted%20that%20people,high%20in%20neuroticism%20will%20also