What's confirmation bias?

And who are Dunning and Kruger?

When something gets a name, it lends credence to it being an actual thing. When it has a study to back up its findings, it’s taken even more seriously. An example is the Dunning-Kruger Effect. So named due to a study over twenty years ago by David Dunning and Justin Kruger on cognitive bias, or confirmation bias.

They found that someone’s enthusiastic confidence in a subject was often inversely proportional to their actual level of knowledge. In other words, the more confident someone is, the less likely they’ll have a grasp on the subject.

To these wallowing waders in the shallow end of the information pool, issues appear black and white without shades of gray.

Imagine being in a jury and only attending the trial when the prosecution is presenting its case. It’ll appear open and shut. However, if you’re well versed in the details of the case, you see the shades of gray.

So, what contributes to this? Curated information. Shots to the hypothalamus that stoke our pleasure centers. Yeah, baby!

We consume information from our big tech overlords as if they are highly paid chefs, cooking up our daily diet of news, each course individually crafted to suit our own unique tastes. Simply put, they give us what they think we already like, blinding us to alternative options. Who can blame the gobbling gourmands. If Google is cooking up something special that provides rapid fire hits of dopamine without a contrary bite anywhere on the menu, it’s like dessert for each course.

Without a balanced diet, we grow sluggish, undernourished, and susceptible to societal ills. We also risk living a life trapped in our own little information bubble, bouncing around aimlessly, confused as to why everyone doesn’t agree with us.

Don’t you agree?