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From Wikipedia: Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias, myside bias or verification bias) is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses.[Note 1][1] People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. For example, in reading about gun control, people usually prefer sources that affirm their existing attitudes. They also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).So, do you suffer from this? I know that I do. I wish I could say whether this is good/bad/right/wrong/indifferent. In science, my guess is that this would be BAD. In lots of other professions, this can be a lot more subjective. Kiefer's article on IF brought this to mind. How many times do we look at many things (diet, politics, work-outs) with blinders on? Sometimes the mind is truly like a steel trap; nothing gets in or out.... Rambling over... Move along.
Coaching yourself to avoid confirmation bias can take years. It takes some amount of ego suppression — you have to stop needing to be Right all the time and start wanting to see Truth.But it's like the Matrix: once you start noticing confirmation bias in your own thoughts and decisions and in the arguments of others, you start to realize just how much of the world is running on this fallacy.
It's easier to take the blinders off for the information we read, than it is for our day to day. I think most of it is like Naomi said, a self importance, but it's also greed. Those few people who can separate from this can be humble and are true scholars of life. People spin even stories they tell about their lives to make them into what they want.
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