5 Strategies To Combat Confirmation Bias

5 STRATEGIES TO СOMBAT CONFIRMATION BIAS CATCH YOURSELF IN THE ACT • Before you let your mind lock down a specific line of thinking and be certain about it, take a moment to step back and question your thinking • Do you feel good about your decision, does evidence match your belief, are people around you aligned with your viewpoint, do your past experiences support your opinion, did you replace unknown information with your opinion • As you learn to catch yourself in such moments, your brain will automatically start detecting patterns signalling you to take on a different course LOOK FOR CONTRADICTORY VIEWPOINT • It may feel good to find information that confirms your initial position, but you cannot for sure know the whole story without engaging in diverse opinions and encouraging dissent • Inquire the source of your information, quality of your sources, which part of the information is relevant to the belief, how can you be wrong, who can you listen to for exploring the other side of your argument • By inquiring the source of your information and challenging its truth, you give permission to your brain to explore alternatives FRAME YOUR QUESTION CORRECTLY • How you frame questions plays a pivotal role in the quality of the information you gather. The question can be designed to seek confirmatory evidence or provide another side of the argument • Different instances of behaviour will come to mind based on the question asked • Asking open ended questions that are not aligned with confirmatory evidence is a great way to seek data that's not compatible with the beliefs you hold EXPRESS YOUR OPINION IN PROBABILITIES • By expressing our belief on a scale either as a percentage or a range, we nudge our mind to remind us of the probabilistic nature of our beliefs - they are neither 100% right nor 100% wrong • By incorporating uncertainty into our belief system we can shift our perspective from trying to be right to finding information that improves our beliefs • Expressing uncertainty in our own beliefs and decisions invites others to express their opinion without fear of judgement BE PART OF AN ACCOUNTABILITY GROUP Being part of a group whose main purpose is to help each other establish a better line of thinking can enable us to be more open-minded • A good charter for this group must include disagreement over agreement, accountability to engage in expressing the real opinion, openness to seek diverse perspectives, rewarding and reinforcing honesty, social approval to admit that we are wrong, shared understanding that it's better to update our beliefs than live with outdated thinking MORE AT WwW.TECHTELLO.COM @TECHTELLO