Psychologyspeaking topic
Confirmation bias: why do we only pay attention to information that supports what we already believe? Why do we demand far more evidence to change our minds than to keep them?
— Peter Wason, confirmation bias
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- Each time we remember an event we rebuild it, mostly out of words, and the memory reshapes itself to fit the telling. Describing a face in words even makes you worse at recognizing that face later. Is telling a memory a way of preserving it, or of slowly corrupting it?
- The Dunning-Kruger effect: why are the people who know the least sometimes the most confident? And why can our confidence actually drop as we learn more about a subject?
- Effort justification: why do we value something more the more effort and hardship we went through for it? Why does hard-won feel more precious?
- The Barnum effect: why do horoscopes feel like they were written just for us? Why do we read vague, flattering statements as personal truths?
- The more often you see a person, the more you like them, even if they never do anything special. Familiarity alone manufactures affection. So does liking really belong to the person, or to the comfort of 'familiar and harmless'?