Seeking Disconfirmation

Confirmation bias is the king of brain tricks. It protects all the others. It makes all your other biases harder to spot and fix, because it stops you from seeing proof that would expose them.

Fighting it requires doing something that feels deeply unnatural: actively looking for reasons you might be wrong.

The Problem With Being Right

Here’s something uncomfortable: the feeling of being right is identical whether you’re actually right or completely wrong.

That sense of certainty-that feeling of “I know this”-it’s the same when your belief matches reality and when it doesn’t. The feeling provides zero information about accuracy. None.

This is why confident people are so often wrong. Confidence is about psychology, not truth. It’s about how strongly you hold a belief, not about whether the belief is correct.

How Confirmation Bias Works

Once you believe something, your brain starts working to keep that belief. It’s not trying to find truth-it’s trying to protect existing beliefs.

Selective attention: You notice evidence that supports your belief. You gloss over evidence that contradicts it. The contradicting evidence is right there, but you don’t see it.

Reading it your way: Unclear evidence gets read as supporting your belief. The same facts that someone with the opposite view would see as proving you wrong, you see as proving you right.

Selective memory: You remember the confirming examples better than the disconfirming ones. Your mental highlight reel is biased.

Selective search: When you look for information, you ask questions that are likely to confirm rather than challenge. You don’t Google “evidence against my position.”

This happens automatically. You don’t choose it. It’s not a character flaw. It’s just how brains work-all brains, including yours.

The Wason Selection Task

In 1966, psychologist Peter Wason demonstrated confirmation bias with a simple card task. Most people fail it, and the pattern of failure is revealing.

You see four cards showing: A, K, 4, 7

You’re told: “If a card has a vowel on one side, it has an even number on the other.”

Which cards must you flip to test if this rule is true?

Most people say A and 4.

The correct answer is A and 7.

Here’s why: You need to look for ways the rule could be false. The rule would be false if a vowel had an odd number on the other side. So you flip A (to check if there’s an even number behind it) and 7 (to check if there’s a vowel behind it-which would violate the rule).

Flipping 4 tells you nothing useful. Even if there’s a vowel behind 4, that’s fine. The rule says vowels must have even numbers-it doesn’t say even numbers must have vowels.

Most people instinctively seek confirmation (A and 4) rather than disconfirmation (A and 7). They’re trying to prove the rule true rather than trying to prove it false. But you can only test a rule by looking for violations.

Real-World Confirmation Bias

In relationships

You think your partner is inconsiderate. You notice every forgotten request, every late arrival, every thoughtless comment. The considerate things? You don’t notice them, or you dismiss them as exceptions that don’t count.

Someone who thinks their partner is considerate sees the exact same behaviors and interprets them differently. Same data, different filter, completely different conclusions.

In work

You think a colleague is incompetent. You remember their mistakes, notice their struggles, interpret their questions as signs of ignorance rather than curiosity. Their successes? Flukes. Luck. Someone else did the real work.

Someone who thinks this colleague is competent sees the same person completely differently. Same colleague, different narrative.

In politics

You think your side is reasonable and the other side is extreme. You read articles that confirm this. Your social media feed-curated by algorithms that know what you engage with-shows you the worst of the opposition and the best of your side. Every scandal confirms what you already believed.

People on the other side have exactly the same experience, with the roles reversed. They’re also watching their feed and concluding that your side is the unreasonable one.

In self-assessment

You think you’re good at X. You remember times you succeeded at X. You explain failures as circumstances, bad luck, or unfair conditions. Your self-image remains intact despite evidence that might warrant revision.

Or you think you’re bad at X, and the same filtering runs in reverse-successes are flukes, failures are proof of your fundamental inadequacy.

The Disconfirmation Habit

The antidote is deliberate: actively seek evidence that you’re wrong.

This feels weird because it is weird. Your brain doesn’t want to do this. Every instinct fights it. It feels like hurting yourself, like helping the other side, like making yourself weaker.

But it’s actually fixing yourself. It’s how you find out you’re wrong before life teaches you the hard way.

Ask better questions

Instead of “Why am I right about this?” ask:

“What would change my mind?”
“What would I expect to see if I were wrong?”
“What’s the strongest argument against my position?”
“Who disagrees with me, and why might they be right?”

These questions don’t come naturally. You have to force them.

Seek out disagreement

Read things you disagree with-but thoughtfully, not to find ammunition for mockery. Try to understand why reasonable people believe differently.

The goal isn’t to change your mind on everything. It’s to understand the actual landscape of views rather than a caricature of your opponents.

Assign someone to disagree

Before important decisions, assign someone (or yourself) to argue the opposite position as strongly as possible.

In organizations, this is sometimes called a “red team” or “devil’s advocate.” It only works if the disagreement is taken seriously, not dismissed as a formality that everyone ignores.

Keep a record

Write down your predictions and beliefs. Check them later. Don’t trust your memory-it will quietly rewrite history to make you seem right. Memory is not a video recording; it’s a reconstruction that flatters you.

Writing it down forces honesty. You can’t claim you “knew all along” when your guess is sitting there in ink saying the opposite.

Notice your emotions

When you feel defensive, that’s information. Defensiveness often signals that something is threatening a belief you’re attached to-which means that belief might be worth examining.

Instead of defending harder, ask: “Why does this challenge bother me so much? Is there something here I should consider?”

The Hard Part

Seeking disconfirmation is especially hard for beliefs tied to your identity.

If “I’m smart” is core to how you see yourself, admitting you’re wrong about something feels like admitting you’re not smart. So you defend positions you shouldn’t, argue past the point of reason, refuse to update even when the evidence is clear-all to protect an identity that was never actually threatened.

The reframe: Being able to change your mind is part of being smart. Smart people are wrong sometimes. Everyone is wrong sometimes. What distinguishes smart people is their ability to recognize when they’re wrong and update accordingly.

“I don’t know” is a valid answer. “I was wrong” is a respectable statement. “You’ve changed my mind” is a sign of strength, not weakness.

What Successful Disconfirmation Looks Like

Let’s be clear about what this isn’t:

Abandoning all your beliefs
Becoming wishy-washy about everything
Agreeing with whoever talked to you most recently

And what it is:

Holding beliefs with appropriate confidence (not too much, not too little)
Updating when evidence warrants
Understanding the actual arguments against your position, not a strawman version
Distinguishing between the strong and weak parts of your own views

You can hold strong opinions while remaining open to changing them. You can be confident while acknowledging uncertainty. These aren’t contradictions-they’re signs of calibrated, mature thinking.

A Daily Practice

Each day, pick one belief and genuinely try to challenge it:

State the belief clearly
List evidence that supports it
List evidence that challenges it (try for equal length-this is the hard part)
Consider: What would it take to change your mind?
Consider: Is your confidence level appropriate given the evidence?

You don’t have to change your mind. You just have to look honestly.

Over time, this habit changes how you hold beliefs-less rigidly, more accurately, more appropriately calibrated to the actual evidence rather than to your emotional investment.

What’s Next

The final part covers the art of changing your mind-what happens when the evidence genuinely does warrant updating your beliefs, and how to do it without treating yourself as a failure.

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