KEY CONCEPTS FOR MAKING INFORMED HEALTHCARE CHOICES

Claims about what might improve or harm our health are everywhere. Many claims are not reliable, and most people have difficulties distinguishing these from reliable claims. This leads to poorly informed choices, unnecessary waste and suffering.

Our brains have to process an infinite amount of stimuli and make an endless number of decisions. So to save time and mental energy, our brains rely on heuristics, or short-cuts. Think of heuristics like guidelines, or rules of thumb: they’re usually good enough most of the time, but they can result in errors.

Cognitive biases are systematic errors in thinking that interfere with how we reason, process information, and perceive reality. Basically, biases deviate our thinking away from objective reality and cause us to draw incorrect conclusions.

Biases and heuristics are part of our automatic or intuitive system of thinking, so they occur without our awareness. But because they impact nearly all of our thinking and decision making, familiarity with the most common errors is a great way to become a better critical thinker.

Confirmation bias refers to the tendency to search for, interpret, and remember information that confirms our beliefs. In short, we prefer information that tells us we’re right…and we’re more likely to remember the hits and forget the misses.

In a world full of too much information, our brains need to take short-cuts. Unfortunately, some of these short-cuts can lead us astray. In the case of confirmation bias, the short-cut is: Does this piece of information support what I already think is true? If so, we assume there’s no need to question it.

Of all the biases, confirmation bias is the most powerful and pervasive, constantly filtering reality without our awareness to support our existing beliefs. It’s also self-reinforcing: because confirmation bias makes it seem like our beliefs are supported by evidence, we grow even more confident we’re right, and thus the more we filter and ignore information that would change our mind.

A prime example of confirmation bias plays out in our modern media environment, where we’re able to select news organizations and even the types of stories that validate our worldview. With the help of algorithms that learn our preferences, we can get trapped in filter bubbles, or personal information ecosystems, where we’re served more and more content that reaffirms our existing beliefs and protected from evidence that we’re wrong. (We really don’t like being wrong.) In essence, we assume our news feed is telling us about reality, when the reality is it’s telling us about us.

Confirmation bias is also one of the biggest reasons we fall for “fake news.” Why bother spending time and energy fact checking that viral video or news story or meme when it already fits with what you believe? It feels true, so it must be!

Our learning resources are developed to enable people to think critically about decisions that impact our health, the health of our communities and the health of our environment.