Confirmation Bias

Understanding confirmation bias feels imperative to any career in writing but strikes a particular chord with me as a journalist. In other areas of academic work, it's used to one's advantage. Argumentative essays stand firmly in one point and utilize sources that may even be used to argue against the idea to support it instead. People's perception of concepts becomes so warped by confirmation bias that they can't process being wrong so they just take any position to be proven right. After going through the assigned reading, I can understand more of the dangers of confirmation bias on a macroscale. Though there are some frivolous instances in which confirmation bias comes through, such as the experiment designed by Mark Snyder and Nancy Candor, it has the potential to cause serious divides among people. For example, confirmation bias can be found in a fair amount of political news with the sensationalism of headlines. Viewers and readers can take any position that appears in their mind and validate it with a browser search, and then carry those beliefs onto forums on the internet.

In contrast, I can relate heavily to the frequency illusion in that it feels like a constant in several aspects of my life. For example, as a student who consumes large amounts of readings for classes and is an admirer of physics, it is plain to see the real-life counterparts of some phenomena. From the exacting of lightning and its cause to literary references in pop culture and on random t-shirts at Walmart. One can feel consumed by the overwhelming amount of redundancy when they've been learning about a given topic. It feels almost artificial, and crafted by the "forces that be", but it isn't. It's just the frequency illusion.