The Concept of Confirmation Bias and Its Consequences

A) What is confirmation bias? Confirmation bias, literally the preference for confirmation. A more extensive description is, confirmation bias is a way of thinking or behaving, by which people have the tendency to confirm their own opinion or thought. Furthermore, people will only search or accept arguments or facts that will confirm their opinion or thought. Moreover, people will not notice or rather devalue the arguments that contradict their opinion or thought. So confirmation bias is tendency to be selective for the information, that will be used or believed, or in other words; see the world through a filter.

B) In my direct surroundings, I have a lot to do with farmers. Only recently the news depicts them as culprit of the global warming, and the biggest producer of detrimental gases. In every newspaper, or broadcast they say that it is indeed the farmers’ cows or pigs, and especially the intensive livestock farming that produces these detrimental gasses. But when you have a look at the interest groups of farmers, I know it is also a bit bias, you will see that they do everything to produce less and less harmful gasses every year. Only in the news, there is no time or place for the farmers’ interest group, therefore the normal civilian will blame the farmer. That is why they ask the government for extra regulations, which hurt the farmer, and will in the long time, alone, not prevent the global warming. In case the government will make such regulations, there will be no farmer left in the Netherlands, so we have to import meat, milk and other products, which should be imported by trucks or even planes. But no one even thinks about these harmful emissions because people always need their cars, trucks and planes. This confirmation bias, that the news give will lead to irrational decisions by the government, who makes rules for the farmer that will cost them their farms. Also, it would only chance the problem, and not solve it.

C) Karl Popper’s criterion gives a reasonable requirement for scientific theories. According to Popper, you can only call a theory, a scientific theory, if and only if it should be possible to prove their theory wrong by observations. A scientific theory, it is the fallibility that makes it a good theory and not the fact that it is a foregone conclusion. By looking for counter arguments or observations, the scientist will be protected against their own confirmation bias, due to the fact that, they have to search for a thing that contradict their theory. So they do not only look for experiments that confirm their theory. And when the scientist or any specialist cannot find anything that contradict their theory, it should be true, but that does not mean that you can stop looking for counter arguments, or observations. This continuous search for observations who prove their theorem wrong, will make it a reliable theorem and prevent them from the confirmation bias.