Source: Dumb Little Man
No matter how much you share political stories on Facebook, you’ll likely never change your friends’ opinions on the issues. In fact, sharing and reacting to political posts will only create a more polarized community because Facebook’s algorithms show you what you like.
This is where learning how to avoid confirmation bias becomes tricky.Polarizing Opinions on Social Media
On social media, Democrats and Republican link to articles that share their party’s natural bias. Almost half of the links shared by Congress members come from these slanted sources. It’s not just political figures that tend to be biased, either.
Each time you like an article on one side of the debate or ignore a post from an opposing side, Facebook gets more data on what you want to see. Over time, your news feed will show information from fewer sources and you may even land yourself in a fake-news bubble.
This sort of echo chamber occurs when dissenting opinions are filtered out of the dialog. It enables confirmation bias, the natural human tendency to overemphasize information that supports one’s opinion and overlook anything that could prove it wrong.
This underlying human flaw doesn’t just change how we consume information; it affects how we share it as well. Social media users share news articles from liberal or conservative sources 22% more often than stories from more centrist outlets.
Investigating Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias lets us cherry-pick information without even realizing we’re doing it.
Multiple studies show that humans tend to have a strong tendency to hold to an established opinion, regardless of evidence.In 1975, the Stanford suicide note legitimacy study asked two…
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