The Effects of Confirmation Bias on Decision Making

The ability to make effective decisions can be considered a vital skill from both a professional and personal perspective. But how do you know if you really are making the best possible decision? To start, you need to understand the psychological and behavioral drivers that make up confirmation bias and ultimately influence how decisions are made.

Transcript

Before making a particular decision, individuals need to collect, review, and interpret information that then allows them to make a better choice or judgment.

This information search, however, can be internal and external. We can search our memory, or we can search for actual information on the internet or through friends.

What we end up doing, often, is allow prior knowledge to shape the search process that we engage in. We actually search for information that confirms what we initially believe in, and then we interpret that information in the same manner. Consider, for example, the last time you evaluated an instructor, an employee, a friend. It ends up that what you believed about them before you ever met them, shapes how you interpret the interaction you first had with them. Take the following study as an example.

In a class of students, half were told that a guest speaker is a bit cold, while the other half were told that they’re warm and friendly. When students then evaluated the guest speaker after the lecture, it turns out that what they have believed initially shaped their judgments. Those who thought that the speaker is cold, rated them as being indeed colder than those who thought that they’re warm. Again, they saw the exact same lecture by the exact same instructor, but the belief that they had shaped what they saw.

There are then two ways in which confirmation biases occur. One is through an interpretation of information that is presented to us, and the other is by biased search. When we believe a particular product is good, we tend to search for information that confirms our prior beliefs. So it is this combination of biased search and biased interpretation that give rise to overall confirmation bias. It is this tendency that is suboptimal and can lead us to make wrong decisions.

Think of your own decision-making.

Can you think of an instance where your own prior beliefs have actually shaped your evaluation of a person or a product that you encountered? Now think of how this knowledge of confirmation bias can actually change the ways in which you interpret information and you search for information before making a decision.