Confirmation Bias

Last week, I challenged us all to ask better questions. I wrote that many of us ask questions, not to find answers, but instead, to justify what we all ready believe.

Confirmation bias is when we seek information that confirms our beliefs, ignoring information that contradicts it. In order for us to develop, we must be aware of our tendency to look at what we already believe to be true.

So what can we do instead? We can seek disconfirming information. By looking at disconfirming information we challenge our beliefs. We either learn something new, or have a better way to see if what we believe is best.

Recently, at a seminar, the speaker proposed a question to us to help seek disconfirming information:

How might I be wrong about this?

Using this as a screen can help you find the wholes in your game. There’s always something we can do better. For us at Gain, this is how we we continually improve our training programs. When we think we have it all figured out is when we’ll run into trouble.

Justin Miner 

@justin_miner_