Strong convictions can blind us to information that challenges them

When people are highly confident in a decision, they take in information that confirms their decision, but fail to process information which contradicts it, finds a UCL brain imaging study. The study, published , helps to explain the neural processes that contribute to the confirmation bias entrenched in most people's thought processes. Lead author, PhD candidate Max Rollwage (Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at UCL and Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry & Ageing Research) said: "We were interested in the cognitive and neural mechanisms causing people to ignore information that contradicts their beliefs, a phenomenon known as confirmation bias. For example, climate change sceptics might ignore scientific evidence that indicates the existence of global warming. "While psychologists have long known about this bias, the underlying mechanisms were not yet understood. "Our study found that our brains become blind to contrary evidence when we are highly confident, which might explain why we don't change our minds in light of new information." For the study, 75 participants conducted a simple task: they had to judge whether a cloud of dots was moving to the left or right side of a computer screen. They then had to give a confidence rating (how certain they were in their response), on a sliding scale from 50% sure to 100% certain.