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Laurie Reyes

Vincent Oliveri

English 102

02 March 2023

Human Bias and Confirmation Bias in Media

Human beings are born with biases, that is a given. Since the beginning we have been

taught how to choose things based on preferences or things that relate most to us. If you think

about how you live your daily life, you have been taught how to choose different things based on

previous experience and teachings. You may have a preference for strawberry milk instead of oat

milk because you’ve been taught not to like oats, you choose basketball teams based on who you

grew up seeing on TV. However this plays out it is clear that you will always choose things you

have previous positive reinforcement on. Now, how does this work with bigger things other than

simple tastes? Misinformation is often spread via social media we use, the news we see, and the

information we get from groups around us. If you keep receiving the same information you

already believe, regardless of the fact that it may be wrong, you will continue to believe it for as

long as you keep that source.

One example of this spread misinformation is actually quite recent in regards to

COVID-19. Over the past few years we have recovered from one of the worst pandemics in

history, we had many people die regardless of the fact that there were a lot of precautions in

regards to it. Even worse, there were a lot of people who simply did not believe COVID was

real. Other groups, those more prominent in the media, seemed to simply believe in the fact that
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vaccinations were helping with the spread of COVID. The spread of misinformation quite

literally exponentially affected the spread of the pandemic itself. Now, how did this

misinformation spread? The first hints at this begin in the age of social media we live in.

According to Elisa Shearer from the Pew Research Center, “[a]bout half (53%) [of US adults]

say they get news from social media, and a much smaller portion say they get news at least

sometimes from podcasts (22%).” (Pew Research Center). This means that most adults in the

country get their information from some sort of large social media company. However, the big

question is how this negatively affects information and further pushes the spread of confirmation

bias.

Social media is addictive for many reasons, the main one however, happens to be that our

social media caters to our particular likes and wishes. Whatever you want to hear is at the touch

of your fingertips. If you happen to like a certain brand, it will fill your feed and you will

continue to buy it. This similar effect is obvious when liking political groups, information on

candidates, and in this particular case, when dealing with information. Lets say you aren’t

particularly fond of the idea of vaccines, you might even think they’re bogus. If you check your

social media and start looking up things relating to that, it’ll continue to appear in your feed. At

some point this information will not only be part of your feed but other more extreme views may

be slipped into what you see. Slowly, you turn from you neutral stance into
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Works Cited

Shearer, Elisa. “More than Eight-in-Ten Americans Get News from Digital Devices.” Pew

Research Center, Pew Research Center, 12 Jan. 2021,

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/01/12/more-than-eight-in-ten-americans-get-n

ews-from-digital-devices/.