Box of delight

What is confirmation bias?

Broadly speaking, confirmation bias is the tendency of people to overvalue data that supports their own beliefs.

It usually works something like this. Whether based on a fear (e.g., ‘I’m going to lose my job’) or inaccurate and/or incomplete data (e.g., a stereotype), someone that who falls victim to confirmation bias will form an opinion and then seek out and/or overvalue data that supports that opinion. In the former example of losing your job, because of worry over losing your job, you would begin to ‘notice’ things that seemed to support that theory.