How We Lose Ourselves
Confirmation Bias Got My Brother-in-Law Lost in the Wilderness: How To Cope
We all hold prejudices of some kind, but the way we maintain these is telling. A person will attend to data that supports ideas he or she believes to be true, while ignoring evidence to the contrary. We’re perhaps most familiar with this in political discourse, but it intrudes on virtually every corner of human interactions.
Psychologists call it confirmation bias, and when my normally level-headed brother-in-law got caught in its trap a few years ago, the consequences could have been deadly.
In August 2010, I was backpacking with my brothers-in-law Ken …
