Confirmation Bias and the Internet

The internet is vast playground where every opinion is aired, fiction can masquerade as fact, and the answers to your most bizarre questions can be just a google search away.  This abundance of cheap information and ideas is overwhelmingly positive even as there are latent problems.

One problem is that the internet can encourage and reinforce bias — like confirmation bias.  According to wikipedia, confirmation bias is "a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions and to avoid information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs."

Thanks to Google, we can instantly seek out support for the most bizarre idea imaginable.  If our initial search fails to turn up the results we want, we don't give it a second thought, rather we just try out a different query and search again.

Armed with this power to search, it usually doesn't take long to find someone or something that confirms our bias. If you happen to be a blogger or have a website, you can then reinforce your own bias by by writing on the subject and linking to the support you found!

To wit, one of the first things I did in writing this article was search for <a href="http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGLS_en___US311&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=" confirmation+bias"+internet">"confirmation bias" internet, which led me to a cached page and then a quote from a WaPo article titled The Year of Living Gloomily.  The quote snappily nails my overarching point:

People have always been prone to confirmation bias, but the Internet amplifies the phenomenon since we need not look far to confirm our particular bias. It's always a click away.

By making the search for confirmation so easy — a mere "click away" — the internet rapidly exacerbates bias.

It happens just like that.