In all honesty, confirmation bias is an inherently human problem. It is hard-coded in all of us. You can have all the degrees and qualifications in the world—even serve as a United States Senator—yet be comfortably swimming in a pool of confirmation bias. You can be swimming in exactly the same pool if you’re divorced, unemployed and homeless. Not only are the effects personally damaging, but when confirmation bias creeps into a political system, I want to say the effects are potentially catastrophic.
The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021 is a culmination of years of allowing an electorate inside a democratic media landscape to consume media without any ground rules whatsoever. It’s a media landscape driven by savage incentives. Whether it’s the corporation looking to supercharge its revenues with the help of highly controversial political media or whether it’s a politician looking to stay in power by feeding a media-hungry base factually inaccurate or outright false information. The results are negative for society and the democratic process. If this media landscape continues to go unchecked, the U.S. Capitol attacks are just the beginning of the pain and anguish.
If you click over to Wikipedia, the opening paragraph gives an informative overview:
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Confirmation bias cannot be eliminated entirely, but it can be managed, for example, by education and training in critical thinking skills. Wiki
Normally for a psychological pothole like confirmation bias to be most effective, it must come in combination with other cognitive biases that further effect our ability to think critically (think of this particular pothole filled with nails of varying sizes). It is this killer combination that is absolutely lethal and most definitely at work on the minds of millions of Trump voters who are currently drowning in anger, resentment and hatred.
These sharp nails in our psychological pothole that I mentioned above can be any number of other cognitive factors. First and foremost is simply the availability of information, which is the ultra-convenience of social media outlets to confirm and re-confirm our beliefs via filter bubbles. This will do wonders in turning our brains into mush. Another is endowment effect which is kind of like a dead weight on our ability to make changes to what we perceive to be our best held ideas simply because we take ownership of the idea. In other words, my idea is always better than your idea. The list could go on much longer, but two other mental speed bumps are loss aversion or sunk costs that are behavioral elements that cause us to focus on avoiding losses, either because we’ve already made substantial investment in something (i.e. already far down the QAnon rabbit hole) or because we aren’t focusing on what we might gain because we’re too worried about not losing anything.
Do you see what I mean? This battle to achieve unity will take tremendous amounts of patience. It might even require the creation of new institutions in order to properly manage our digital media consumption. The aforementioned cognitive impediments are the same reason why people tend to overstay in bad marriages, continue to hold losing stocks or businesses or in this particular case, believe in highly questionable conspiracy theories or harbor deeply entrenched political beliefs revolving around false election results.
As mentioned in earlier posts, I feel like the rules of digital media must change. New institutions must be setup. There must be some sort of codification of how participants in this rapidly changing media landscape must behave. There must be a highly controlled method of confirming facts and an end to “alternative facts.” Naturally, at this point in the discussion, people will make convenient references to an Orwellian society if a democracy limits speech, but let’s face it, to have a properly function democracy, one needs to protect its electorate from powerful feedback loops that can turn normally functioning people into zombies. Let’s not forget, once transformed, these people were able to justify rubbing their own feces on the walls of the U.S. Capitol building. Please accept my apologies in for creating that stinky image.
At the end of the day, democracy will be its own worst enemy, but just like we have laws on what people can say and do to each other in the real world, similar laws shall apply in the digital realm. That is the path forward for American Democracy version 2.0. Failure to act on this front will be a rapid degradation of democracy itself.
Faisaling.com 
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