Crisis Communications Expert: Dealing With Your Audience’s Bias – and Your Own

By Hennes Communications

Welcome to the Golden Age of confirmation bias.

An ancient phenomenon, confirmation bias — the tendency of people to seek out information and points of view they agree with – has references stretching back to Greek historians.

As we wrote about a year ago, confirmation bias and its close cousin “the backfire effect” – people digging in harder on an original position when faced with facts that run counter to their beliefs – now are on steroids, thanks mostly to social media.

According to a recent study on the spread of misinformation, people who select and support self-confirming content on social media create an echo chamber that can segregate and further polarize users. “Users mostly tend to select and share content related to a specific narrative and to ignore the rest,” according to the study.

With the polarizing politics of the past year, lots of people have been writing and talking about confirmation bias.

Here’s one of the best deep dives we’ve seen, as noted crisis communications expert Peter Sandman explores first how to counter confirmation bias in audiences you’re trying to reach and in part two, how to overcome your own biases.