#confirmation bias?

[bethanydelleman]

The way that Elizabeth Bennet is tricked by Wickham is so important because it's confirmation bias and we are all so susceptible to it. Of course Elizabeth ate up everything negative Wickham said about Darcy with a spoon, it's what she already thought! Wickham checked first. Once he knew Elizabeth hated Darcy, he fed her ego by letting her know that not only was she right, but she was special and smart for seeing through Darcy's wealth and status.

"The world is blinded by his fortune and consequence, or frightened by his high and imposing manners, and sees him only as he chooses to be seen." - Wickham, Ch 16

The world is blind, but not Elizabeth! Not with her supreme powers of perception and character reading. She sees the "real" Darcy...

And then of course, the best warning Elizabeth gets about Wickham (and I'll admit it's not a great one) is from Caroline Bingley, a woman she detests (I cut out the snobbery around it):

"Let me recommend you, however, as a friend, not to give implicit confidence to all his assertions; for, as to Mr. Darcy’s using him ill, it is perfectly false: for, on the contrary, he has been always remarkably kind to him, though George Wickham has treated Mr. Darcy in a most infamous manner. I do not know the particulars, but I know very well that Mr. Darcy is not in the least to blame; that he cannot bear to hear George Wickham mentioned..." Caroline Bingley, Ch 18

Elizabeth's judgment isn't perfect, it's highly subject to bias. Jane Austen's understanding of the human condition was amazing. She set Elizabeth's deception up in such an accurate way it could be in a modern social psychology textbook. Of course she believed Wickham; of course she discounted Caroline, it's human nature.

[gingerswagfreckles]

People just really fundamentally do not believe in objective reality anymore regardless of political affiliation, huh? People have their political beliefs and then work backwards from there, deciding what is and isn't true based on what supports what they want to believe.

[the-mpregnatural-guy]

ok but late seasons shawn spencer is an absolutely INSANE human bc you have a little fella who has finally found the people that he loves, but he's so scared of them leaving him that he refuses to mature with his relationships bc upsetting the status quo means things will change and if things change people might stop loving him so he hangs onto the facade harder than ever and does ridiculous things to support his pathological lies, but the foundation was cracked to begin with which is why it crumbles so horrifically in s7

[sabertoothwalrus]

I really appreciate ryoko kui making multiple auburn haired/black eyed characters. It’s a combo I don’t see often and I feel very represented by it

[mimefish]

So you're telling me that Scar naturally got the permit for sand, giving him the coveted monopoly, and didn't even want it anymore, whereas Grian has wound up with the permit for red sand and does actually want to use it. Red sand. Red. Meanwhile the end of third life involved Grian killing Scar and staining the sand with his blood following a conflict fuelled by a hopeless monopoly. And it's still following them years after the actual murder. And I'm supposed to be normal about this how exactly

[criiitter]

i didn't even know about the ao3 curse until i published my first few chapters of my first ever fanfic and ended up in the hospital a couple days later. my partner drove me home when i got discharged and i mentioned the fanfic in passing and they were like. "oh my god. i can't believe it's real." and i was like what??? what's real?????? and proceeded to learn the horrors. anyway. back to the gay people who live in my phone

[idontmindifuforgetme]

Was literally going apoplectic w anxiety over something this morning and it just turned out that it was literally nothing to worry about . I’m writing this post bc I will do this again in the future and need to remind myself this instance disproved my confirmation bias

[tezzbot]

I've seen quite a few people say that Branch was left alone to raise himself after his grandma died but, like, I really doubt that, because with their living situation there must have been hundreds of parents and primary guardians taken when their children were still young.

So I headcanon that there must have been a sort of, everyone was in charge of raising the kids as a collective type thing. It was just that Branch really had connection with pretty much no one outside of his family and had lost just so much already, and with him turning grey he wasn't able to bounce back like other kids his age might have been.

I imagine there was meal times he sat quietly away from everyone else, kind of picking at his food. He probably wouldn't have participated in any activities with the other kids. He just slowly isolated himself until eventually he was just left alone by other kids. Leaving any adults taking care of the groups he was in to simply worry about him, but still keep him fed and making sure he got outside at least once a day.

Maybe, like a lot of quiet kids, he took to reading. Sort of teaching himself how to survive (on paper lol). It was probably a "Well at least he's doing Something." for the caretakers lol

Then, on the night of the escape, someone would have had to have gone and got him, helped him through the tunnels, made sure that he got to the place that would become pop village, house him while he grew and began creating his bunker.

Then eventually he would become a snappy teenager, learning the the moodier he was, the more that other trolls, no matter his age or not, would begin just leave him alone.

Well GOOD, alone was what he really wanted.

...Wasn't it?

He would grump around outdoors sneering and barking things angrily at others and have his panic attacks and plans in the solitary saftey of his bunker... which Could be even safer, maybe if he just dug it down a little deeper... ten stories might just be enough... For storage that is.

He isolated himself. He made the village roll their eyes and turn their backs on him. Confirmation bias is a hell of a thing. Yes, as long as he was the one making people leave him on purpose then it was his decision not his fault

But there are likely some older trolls in the village that probably still wonder if they could have done more to prevent Branch from becoming so suddenly hateful and rude and miserable

[wife-beam]

a lot of people act like sqq’s main character trait is obliviousness and i could not disagree more

[unsolicited-opinions]

Nobody is immune to propaganda and flattery. Today's example is Nicholas Kristof.

Kristof has won two Pulitzer prizes for journalism and is a columnist for the New York Times. One could be forgiven for hoping that Kristof might be harder to sucker than the average illiberal left campus Hamasnik, but it turns out that speaking to his orientalist, white savior ego and confirming biases is so effective that he'll skip doing *any* basic journalism.

Here's Kristof on 1/31/25, using a Twitter post from Omar Hamad as an example to argue that it is wrong to suggest that Palestinians overwhelmingly support Hamas and the attacks of 10/7/23.

In his post, Hamad shows a copy of a book Kristof co-authored and gives it a glowing review.

Kristof clearly enjoyed the glowing praise and responded by arguing that Omar Hamad shows us how Palestinians are clearly sensitive and tolerant.

To be clear, I'm sure many Palestinians are sensitive and tolerant, but Omar Hamad isn't one of them and this is an ironic way to make the argument.

Here are other tweets from Omar Hamad:

"O God, take the Jews and wash the earth with them and make our land their graves"

"By God, mother, God's victory can only be achieved through blood."

The truth is that neither my family nor I were ever part of Hamas. We lived in Gaza like any other family that did not belong to Hamas. However, I deeply regret that. I regret not being part of October 7, and I regret not firing a rocket at our occupied lands. I regret not killing an Israeli soldier. This regret has been planted within every person in Gaza, even in those who were opposed to Hamas's ideology. You are nothing but bloodthirsty butchers. You could have gained the sympathy of the entire world, but you revealed your true nature, your vile, Nazi- like, bloodstained face. Do not think that just because you hold power now, you are right or eternal, immune to defeat. Let me remind you, in one era, no force was greater than the Mongols, but their time came, and they were defeated. In another period, no one was more powerful than the Nazis, yet they too were defeated. Now, it is you, and I tell you, you will be defeated. If not now, then in the years to come.

Kristof didn't even bother to look up who was heaping this praise on him. He saw the praise, he let his confirmation bias and ego fill in the blanks instead of trying...you know...investingating, reading, looking for supportable facts, questioning sources, examining biases...you know...journalism.

The only thing which makes this example of falling for flattering confirmation bias bait extraordinary is that it's a Pulitzer Prize winner doing it - this is exactly what's happening every minute among the west's far left and we can see their disdain for facts and reason all over social media. Their disregard for intellectual rigor and intellectual honesty is comparable to that of the MAGA dittoheads on the far right.

This the intellectual laziness, these are the unexamined set of biases which animate the anti-Israel campus protestors who wave the flags of Islamist movements like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Movements who would happily murder their useful idiots at Columbia University and Harvard.

They are markedly more susceptible to propaganda which speaks to their white savior views of themselves...than this two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

[dantesjourney]

I really wish more people on the left/blue side of things in the US would start verifying things before sharing. There is twisted information on both sides, and I'm seeing so many people doing the exact same thing we like to crucify the right for - sharing/reposting/amplifying something just because it alines with our beliefs/fears/narrative. Without fact checking or independent verification.

Search engines are free.

Idc how much you trust the source - even trusted, reliable sources can be wrong sometimes. Verify it for yourself.

I'm not saying they're necessarily willfully lying to us. There is so much information coming at all of us at such an incredible rate that it is easy to misunderstand, misinterpret, misread, take something out of context or simply get swept up in the emotion of it all and forget to fact check.

Also, we're only human. Those of us with a working moral compass, a heart and more than two functioning brain cells are quite rightly terrified/experiencing a rollercoaster of emotions. It is easy to get caught up in that to the point that it takes over. Stop. Take a deep breath. Back away from the social media and go look it up with a proper search engine. Sometimes you might be pleasantly surprised.

This entire situation is exhausting enough without repeated facepalms from seeing people I know and love on the left spreading misinformation simply because it is plausible and/or aligns with the narrative they want.

[coquelicoq]

i love how when taki isamu the skeptic sees natsume say, after asking the thin air some questions, that his sister's in danger in the storehouse and they rush over there and it's true, he has no follow-up questions about how natsume got that information. i get that he was distracted by the adrenaline and the childhood memories but you'd think eventually it would occur to him to be like hey wait a minute.

[kalpalatas]

i can't tell if this is sarcasm and it's killing meeeee

[bisexualfbiagents]

you ever think that the x files is just a silly little show from the 90s and seemingly no longer relevant and then BAM a youtuber uses the theme song to denote something spooky and you're like ok they probably have no idea where that song is from so whatever? so you scroll on tiktok for a while and BAM a thirst edit of fox mulder with a million views comes across your for you page and you just chalk it up to the algorithm right? so you think oh boy i need something to take the edge off and then BAM the packaging for the edibles you just bought has aliens all over it and literally says I WANT TO BELIEVE across the top and then you're like ok. so maybe my silly little show from the 90s is more ingrained in the cultural zeitgeist than i thought.

[moonshynecybin]

does vale just have like wildly low emotional intelligence to be this delusional about their fallout (he’s ignoring like. large swaths of context for 2015 i think. like it’s crazy that his and marc’s stories are so wildly mismatched not just in terms of content but also in terms of TIMELINE) or are his unique trauma responses to a tough childhood and fame and competing in god’s most awful death sport just insanely damaging. wait just answered my own question. um.