Confirmation Bias

You are scrolling through the cesspool that is social media, and you stumble upon an article with a title of “FEMA refuses access to NC donations.”

Your mind goes, “Yeah, FEMA sucks. Just another example of the government ‘helping’.”

Why?

Because your confirmation bias is at work. What you read matches what you expect to read, it matches what you want to be true.

A leftist reads, “Trump makes racists comments at rally.” Their confirmation bias says that this is true.

The confirmation bias can be so strong, that no amount of evidence can break through. The fine people hoax is a good example of this.

We call it a hoax. They say we are lying. They know we are lying because “MAGAts” always lye. Besides, they have seen the video. He says those words.

Confirmation bias can overtake common sense and people that generally make good decisions.

The other day, Ally was telling me about Marjorie Taylor Greene saying something about government weather control in the house.

I’ve heard MTG say really dumb things. She seems to be a good representative, but occasionally, she doesn’t apply common sense to what she is saying/thinking.

Since I have come to expect MTG to say such “dumb things”, my confirmation bias kicked in. I was thinking, “Yeah, that sounds like something she would say, buying into the latest conspiracy theory.”

This led to the next words out of my mouth, “I’ve not verified that she said that.”

Ally told me she had. I accept that as a given. I still have not verified. I believe it to be true, I don’t know that it is true. Therefore, I tell you to verify before you pass it on.

This morning, She showed me a video purporting to be a CBS “cut and paste” of answers into her interview.

In the video, the top version showed Kamala answering a question without actually answering, but cleanly. The bottom version showed her answering the question in a faulting, stilled way.

The interview is done with cut edits. A cut edit is when there is no transition from one scene to the next. It just “cuts” from one scene to the next.

A standard interview technique is called the “one camera interview”. The camera is set up behind the interviewer, focused on the person being interviewed. The interviewer asks their questions, the camera records the answers. The camera is then repositioned facing the interviewer. They then run through the same questions with the camera recording the questions.

Back in the studio, the two videos are spliced, making it appear that they are two cameras.

You can see this used in some interview fakes. A person positions a camera pointing at themselves. They ask a series of questions. They then splice the answers from different interviews and different questions as the response. This makes the person being “interviewed” look like an idiot.

When I was presented with the video of Kamala, my confirmation bias kicked in. Yes, CBS would do this. Yes, Kamala is so bad at answering questions, they likely had multiple takes. This is real.

This caused me to go, “This is too good to be true. I need to verify.”