Confirmation bias is the one to watch for

Confirmation bias is the most pernicious and prevalent cognitive bias. It appears to be a default aspect of how humans see the world.

It can apply at all levels of information processing: what you choose to pay attention to in your subjective experience, what you search for when looking for evidence, how you evaluate and interpret it, etc.

It can apply to topics you have no stake in and have only briefly been exposed to, because People are extremely ready to generate beliefs about the world. Because of this your Default beliefs about any topic are likely unexamined but still affect behavior.

Confirmation bias in a self-reinforcing feedback loop is especially powerful. It works something like this:

• You hold the belief “I make correct assessments”
• For a particular topic, you hold some prior view
• You process information in ways consistent with that prior view
• This confirms your prior view further
• Your belief “I make correct assessments” is then also further confirmed

Because of this process, “I make correct assessments” can be considered a kind of “g factor” of biases. It can supercharge biases as it is often the starting point for belief consistent information processing.

It is important to think through Ways to counteract confirmation bias for topics where you care about the truth.

References:

• My post on this paper: Toward Parsimony in Bias Research: A Proposed Common Framework of Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of Biases