Confirmation and Other Biases

About This Lesson

This is the first of two lessons that explore the ways in which biases affect news and information—how news is created and reported (by journalists and others) and how we interpret it. 

The lesson begins with an activity that helps students experience confirmation bias firsthand. Then, students gain context for their experience by hearing from experts about how confirmation bias operates in all of us. Finally, we set the stage for the ongoing discussion about the challenges of separating fact from fiction by listening to a National Public Radio story about efforts to correct rumors and fake news.

Essential Questions

• How can people have vastly different understandings of the basic facts of a situation?
• What is confirmation bias and how does it relate to our implicit biases?

Learning Objectives

• Students will be able to define and understand explicit, implicit, and confirmation bias.
• Students will be able to examine why people sometimes maintain their beliefs in the face of information that refutes them.

Activities

Activity 1: Experience Confirmation Bias

The following video illustrates the Wason Rule Discovery Test to introduce the idea of confirmation bias.

Play “Can You Solve This?” Stop the video at 1:10 and ask students if they can guess the rule. Ask them to explain their thinking. Then play the video to the end. Why do people have trouble guessing the rule?

What can we conclude from this video about the challenges we face when we try to make sense and judge the veracity of the news and information that we receive via friends, the Internet, social media, etc.?

Instead of watching the video, students can also experience the Wason Rule Discovery Test themselves through this interactive puzzle version of the test from New York Times.

Activity 2: Define Confirmation Bias

Before viewing the video below, provide the definitions of explicit bias and implicit bias (from the Context section) and of predisposition (the tendency to hold a particular attitude or act in a particular way). Then screen and discuss the video “Defining Confirmation Bias.”

Ask students: What is confirmation bias and how does it work? How might it help explain the differences we saw in the New York Times poll in the last lesson? What strategies did you learn in the “Can You Solve This?” activity that could help offset our tendencies toward confirmation bias? (Instead of trying to prove a hypothesis or belief, look for explanations or facts that disprove it.)

How might confirmation bias influence the way people select and respond to news and information? How does confirmation bias affect our ability to judge the accuracy of information, whether it be from a news story or something else that we see on the Internet?

Activity 3: Explore the Persistence of Misinformation

Confirmation bias is often deeply entrenched in our emotional response to ideas, issues, and beliefs, making it particularly challenging to counteract. Plenty of Internet and social media sources exploit our emotional response (so-called “click bait”). Unfortunately, as we will see in this activity, this kind of viral misinformation can be particularly difficult to correct.

Play the NPR report “Digital Culture Critic Abandons ‘Fake on the Internet’ Column”, which explores the decision by the Washington Post to discontinue a newspaper column dedicated to correcting viral misinformation online. As students listen to the story, have them note words, phrases, or ideas that help to explain why it is so difficult to correct misinformation. What are some of the reasons why people create and share what turns out to be rumor or misinformation? Why do you think these rumors are so hard to stop?

At the conclusion of the story, use the 3-2-1 teaching strategy to review what students have learned in this lesson about confirmation bias and how our biases affect the way we respond to news and information.

Activity 4: Offer Time for Journal Reflection

Wrap up the lesson by asking students to reflect privately in their journals on what they learned about confirmation bias, including how they think confirmation bias might apply to the police video or “Street Calculus” cartoon from the last lesson. They might also think about a time when confirmation bias may have affected their response to a particular situation or information.