There are two well-known psychological phenomena that illustrate just how difficult it is for humans to properly understand themselves and the world around them: confirmation bias and its cousin, the backfire effect. Confirmation bias speaks to our habit of cherrypicking information that supports our previously held beliefs and rejecting any evidence that runs counter to those beliefs. The backfire effect is confirmation bias on steroids: the more we’re faced with evidence that we’re wrong, the more we dig in our…
What If We’re Wrong About Everything?
February 23, 2023