By Amanda N. Weiss

This is the first post on the big idea of confirmation bias.

In a world with an overwhelming abundance of information and opinions, it is no surprise that we do not take it all in and instead must devote our attention to a select subset of information . But, as with every instance of selective information-seeking, we risk our cognitive biases preventing us from forming a well rounded and well reasoned mental model of the world. Confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out information that agrees with our beliefs and reject that which opposes them, is one such element of our psychology. I recently had a discussion with Dr. Tali Sharot, the director of the Affective Brain Lab at the University College London, about her work on the neuroscience of information-seeking and how it relates to confirmation bias. Dr. Sharot is especially interested in figuring out why we engage in behaviors that seem arational (not based on reason), as opposed to those with clear purposes.