Confirmation Bias: Why We Only Look for Confirmation of Our Own Views

⏱ approx. 11 min read 📚 Category: Blog 🕓 Updated: August 2026

The How to Search? team — content verified on the basis of research by Wason (1960), Nickerson (1998), and Festinger (1957), and an analysis of the Kodak case (full list of sources at the bottom of the article), current as of August 2026.

Short answer: We look for confirmation of our own views because the brain strives to reduce cognitive dissonance — the mental discomfort that appears when we encounter information that contradicts what we already believe (Leon Festinger, 1957). It’s easier to find proof that we’re right than to face the possibility that we might be wrong. This phenomenon, called confirmation bias, was first demonstrated experimentally by psychologist Peter Wason in 1960 — today it is one of the best-confirmed cognitive biases in the history of psychology.

What confirmation bias is — the experiment that discovered it

In 1960, British psychologist Peter Wason invited participants to a simple game. He showed them a sequence of numbers: 2-4-6 and said that this sequence followed a certain hidden rule. The participants’ task was to guess the rule by proposing their own number sequences and checking whether they also followed it.

Almost all participants proposed sequences like 8-10-12 or 20-22-24 — that is, consecutive even numbers increasing by 2 — and quickly became convinced that they had cracked the rule. Wason’s actual rule, however, was much simpler: any three increasing numbers. The participants almost never tried to test their hypothesis with a sequence that would refute it (e.g., 1-2-3, or 5-10-11) — they looked only for confirmation and didn’t try to falsify their own theory.

The real cause: why our brain does this

Cognitive dissonance — the discomfort the brain wants to get rid of

The answer goes back to 1957 and the theory of psychologist Leon Festinger. Festinger noticed that when a person holds two contradictory beliefs in their head — or a belief that contradicts a new fact — they feel real mental discomfort, which he called cognitive dissonance. The brain, just as the body avoids physical pain, strives to avoid this discomfort.

The simplest way to get rid of dissonance isn’t to change the belief (that’s cognitively and emotionally costly) — it’s avoiding the information that causes the dissonance, and actively seeking information that reduces it by confirming what we already think. Confirmation bias isn’t a defect in how the brain works. It’s a defense mechanism that evolved to protect us from information overload and paralyzing uncertainty — except that in a world of unlimited access to information, it starts working against us.

Three different ways this mechanism works

In a classic 1998 review of research, psychologist Raymond Nickerson identified three independent mechanisms that make up confirmation bias:

Put yourself in this situation: what it looks like in your own head

Imagine: you believe a certain diet is harmful. You open Google and type “is X harmful” — not “is X safe”. The very wording of the question steers the search engine toward results that confirm your suspicion. From a list of ten results, you click on three whose headlines match what you think — you “scroll past” the opposing headlines, because intuitively they seem less credible, less “professional,” maybe even “sponsored.”

A week later, you remember perfectly that one article that confirmed your opinion. The article that contradicted it — if you opened it at all — has vanished from memory, or you remember it as “not credible,” even if at the time of reading you had no specific objections to its sources. This isn’t intellectual dishonesty on your part. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a brain designed to avoid dissonance — in every person, regardless of education or intelligence.

The sociology of the phenomenon: how social media turns it into echo chambers

Confirmation bias existed long before the internet, but social media algorithms have created an ideal environment for it to grow. A study published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) in 2021 showed that selective exposure — the tendency to consume only content consistent with one’s own views — dominates behavior patterns on the largest social platforms, regardless of how true or false a given piece of information is.

In other words: you don’t need a malicious algorithm for an echo chamber to form. It’s enough for people to do exactly what confirmation bias tells them to — and the platform merely makes it easier for them to do it faster, on a larger scale, and with less effort than ever before in history.

Case study: the company that ignored its own invention

Kodak and the digital camera it created itself

This is one of the most instructive examples of confirmation bias in business. In 1975, Kodak engineer Steve Sasson built the world’s first working digital camera — a device the size of a toaster that took black-and-white photos at a resolution of 0.01 megapixels. He presented it to the company’s management.

“It was filmless photography, so management’s reaction was: ‘that’s cute, but don’t tell anyone about it.’” — Steve Sasson, inventor of the digital camera, recalling the reaction of Kodak’s management

For decades afterward, Kodak’s management consistently chose data and analyses that confirmed what they wanted to believe: that photographic film would remain the dominant technology and digital photography was a niche. The company had the money, the patents, and the technological know-how to dominate the digital market — but instead, for years it invested in maintaining its own comfortable narrative. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

To be fair, it must be added that reality was somewhat more complex than the popular version of this story suggests — in 1975, Sasson’s prototype really wasn’t ready for the market, and mass demand for digital photography didn’t yet exist. That doesn’t change the fact, documented in business analyses (including by the World Economic Forum and Harvard Business Review), that in the following decades — when digital technology became a real threat — Kodak’s management systematically favored data confirming the durability of the film business, at the expense of signals pointing to the coming change.

How to break confirmation bias — a checklist

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