Home / Concept of the Week / Confirmation bias
Concept of the Week · Episode 3
The tendency to look for, notice and remember evidence that supports what you already believe, and to skip past the evidence that does not. Everyone has it. The trick is catching yourself at it.
Where it comes from
The term comes from the English psychologist Peter Wason, whose 1960 experiments showed people testing a rule by looking only for cases that confirmed it.
How Peter explained it on the show
Confirmation bias, sharpened by algorithms and chatbots that are only too happy to tell you that you were right.
Why it mattered that week
Episode three ranged across the French wildfires, the Robert Bush case and the death of Bill Oddie, and confirmation bias was the thread. Peter's image is a bee heading back to the flower it already knows: for most of history that served us well enough. The trouble now is that feeds and chatbots are only too glad to hand you three supportive links and tell you what a wise soul you are, while quietly skipping the four hundred million that say otherwise.
Hear it in context
Death rituals, the Bush case and farewell to Bill Oddie
Why death rituals matter, why there is no correct way to grieve, and why remembering that we are mortal can help us live better.
Questions people ask
You cannot switch it off, but you can build habits that work against it. Ask what evidence would change your mind before you look. Read the strongest version of the other side rather than the weakest. And notice when something feels satisfyingly right, because that feeling is the bias at work, not a sign that you are correct.
The bias is the same. What has changed is that the environment is now built to feed it. An algorithm that learns what you click on will keep serving more of it, and a chatbot that is trained to be agreeable will tend to agree. Peter's advice on the show is to be most careful on the questions that matter most to you, because those are the ones where you least want to be wrong.
Other concepts from the series
Mirror neurons · Authenticity · Attribution theory · INUS conditions · Variable ratio reinforcement · Role exit
About the series
Concept of the Week is a regular feature of Experience, the weekly podcast in which clinical psychologist Professor Peter Kinderman and communications expert Hilary Jeffs take the news apart to see what is driving it. Peter picks a psychological idea most of us have half-remembered wrong and explains what it actually shows. New episodes every Tuesday. Where to listen.