At some point in your life you have probably learned to be wary of biased information - information that is skewed towards a particular belief or opinion to the extent that it leaves out important facts or doesn’t accurately present all sides of an issue.

But what about your own inherent biases and beliefs? While it is good practice to take an author’s purpose or opinion into account when assessing a resource, it is equally important to be aware of your own inherent beliefs and habits that may be clouding your judgement, often subconsciously.

The Psychology of Belief

In 1991 social psychologist Daniel T. Gilbert authored an article in American Psychologist titled “How Mental Systems Believe.” The article was published long before Facebook and news feeds, but his observations about how the brain works are especially relevant today.

According to Gilbert’s studies, we tend to remember the information we encounter first and most often. In order for our brains to process and understand something, we first need to believe it, so our brains initially file it as true. Even once misinformation has been corrected, it is hard for your brain to reverse this belief.

Think about when you incorrectly learn someone’s name. Perhaps you misheard your co-worker Sandra’s name as Sally. No matter how many times you remind yourself, you keep accidentally calling Sandra Sally - it just seems to be stuck in your head.

This is because, as opposed to simply learning something new for the first time, it takes extra effort for your brain to reject and correct something it had previously filed away as true (Gilbert, 1991, p. 112).

Once we've heard or read about something, repetition of that information tends to solidify our beliefs, whether or not it's true (p. 119). This is especially pertinent in the information age, when our social media feeds generate an exhaustive amount of information to sift through on a daily, even hourly basis. Claire Wardle, the lead researcher for First Draft, a website dedicated to discerning truth in the digital age, explains that:

"When we see multiple messages about the same topic, our brains use that as a short-cut to credibility. It must be true we say – I’ve seen that same claim several times today."

Filter Bubbles

The term filter bubble, coined by Eli Pariser in 2011, refers to the isolated perspective created by personalization algorithms on the Internet. Algorithms used by Google, Facebook, and even news outlets filter in information that they think you are likely to click on, based on factors such as your search history, clicks, and where you are located. Consequently, you tend to encounter a very narrow spectrum of information that conforms to and perpetuates your own beliefs.

Filter bubbles can be partially self-created. We tend to be friends with people who have similar interests and share our values. Thus the information shared by connections in our social networks often aligns with and reinforces our own ideals and beliefs. How often have you unfollowed a friend who posted too much about politics that you disagree with?

Associating with like-minded social circles is a natural behavior that pre-exists social media. Personalized search technologies, however, reinforce these tendencies to the extreme. Along with Google’s algorithms, bots are designed to find personalized articles and ads based on what you and your friends are reading, liking and sharing, sending us the information we want before we even know we want it.

Intrigued by the many implications of filter bubbles? You can learn more in the Global Perspectives quest.

Confirmation Bias

We all have values and opinions. This isn’t wrong, it makes us human. But it’s important to keep these inherent biases in mind when we are evaluating information - both the biases of the creator of the information, and our own biases.

Even without personalization technologies, we tend to believe information that conforms to our existing opinions or beliefs. Confirmation bias refers to this tendency to believe what we want to believe, and to resist or avoid facts that say otherwise.

Being aware of and acknowledging our inherent biases can help us look past those biases to more clearly evaluate the facts.

So how do you break free of your filter bubble?

Be an Active vs. Passive Consumer

Being an active metaliterate learner means pausing to question and think, and resisting the tendency to accept information at face value.

When encountering information, check your biases. As much as you might want to believe that the opposing candidate in an election did something outrageous, does it really make sense? Are your biases, the things you want to believe, clouding your judgement?

Websites like Snopes and FactCheck.org can be great for debunking high profile hoaxes and conspiracies, but they can’t cover everything. It is up to up to you to be diligent about the information you encounter, no matter the source. Remember, the information we encounter first is what we tend to file away as true - so try to make that first encounter count.

Fake news and misinformation filters through because it takes time to find reliable sources. It’s easy to passively scroll through news feeds and let news generators decide what information you receive. It’s important to read beyond the headlines, which often employ “clickbait” tactics that are deliberately provocative, but not always accurate.

When possible, go directly to the source of the information. Follow an article’s supporting links and citations (and be skeptical if there aren’t any) back to the original source or hard data. Then judge for yourself what that data means. Just because a citation is listed doesn’t mean it actually supports the author’s argument.

Finally, never share or “like” an article before verifying its accuracy.

Read, Listen, and Watch Outside of Your Bubble

Since information tends to stick the more often you encounter it, try to fill your news feeds with reliable news outlets that present multiple perspectives, and don’t rely on bots, which don’t care about accuracy, to bring the information to you.

• Podcasts (e.g. KCRW’s Left, Right and Center)

• Browser extensions that detect a source’s political leanings (e.g. Official Media Bias Fact Check Icon)

• Neutral News Sources (Reuters and Associated Press, for example are used by many news outlets, and tend to be less biased)

To learn more about expanding your perspective beyond your filter bubble, you may want to explore the Messaging quest.

To complete this quest you will be spending some time examining your information habits closely to gain insight into your own evaluation practices.

REFERENCES

Gilbert, Daniel. “How Mental Systems Believe.” American Psychologist 46 (2), Feb 1991, 107 - 119.

Burkhardt, Joanna M. “Helping Library Users Navigate Fake News.” Presentation at the American Library Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, June 25, 2017.

Ireland, Sonnet. “Fact or Fake? Teaching Our Patrons How to Tell the Difference.” ALA Ignite Session at the American Library Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, June 25, 2017.

Wardle, Claire. “Fake news. It’s complicated.” First Draft. Firstdraftnews.com. Feb 16, 2017.

The following activity is adapted from Blur: How to Know What’s True in an Age of Information Overload by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel.

1. Over the course of a day, pay attention to what information you are getting and where you are getting it from. At the end of the day, reflect on the following questions:

• What information did I get about what topics? Where did I get it? Is it important? Did I miss other information I wish I had spent time learning?

• Did the information advance my knowledge about a subject in a significant way or did it just record tentative or incremental information that seem likely not to be meaningful?

• Did the information tell me something important, fundamentally new, something that gave me a new understanding, or did it merely give details that reinforced what I already understood?

• Did I learn something about a topic that I am most concerned about or that I consider important?

Record your observations using the Bias & Belief worksheet. Download the worksheet and save it to your computer (Click the upper right arrow of the document below to open in Google Drive. Select File-->Download as -->Microsoft Word (.docx)). Submit the completed worksheet to earn this achievement.