Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Confirmation bias is insuperable for most people, but they can manage it, for example, by education and training in critical thinking skills.
Confirmation bias has been described as an internal "yes man", echoing back a person's beliefs like Charles Dickens's character Uriah Heep.
An MRI scanner allowed researchers to examine how the human brain deals with dissonant information.
Francis Bacon
Happy events are more likely to be remembered.
A filter bubble or ideological frame is a state of intellectual isolation that can result from personalized searches, recommendation systems, and algorithmic curation. The search results are based on information about the user, such as their location, past click-behavior, and search history. Consequently, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles, resulting in a limited and customized view of the world. The choices made by these algorithms are only sometimes transparent. Prime examples include Google Personalized Search results and Facebook's personalized news-stream.
The term filter bubble was coined by internet activist Eli Pariser, circa 2010.
Visualization of the process and growth of two social media bots used in the 2019 Weibo study. The diagrams represent two aspects of the structure of filter bubbles, according to the study: large concentrations of users around single topics and a uni-directional, star-like structure that impacts key information flows.