Overcoming ‘confirmation bias’ and the persistence of conspiratorial types of thinking

Abstract

Discussions on media and fakery are usually premised on the general public being manipulated by mainstream media bias or fabrications emanating from the Internet. It is less common in the discipline of media and communication to speculate about users’ reasons for accepting what appear to be basic untruths: I will suggest here that discussions about users’ complicity must become more central to our attempts to understand media and fakery. Rather than a simple rebuttal of the ‘facts’ or the promotion of big data methodologies, this paper will suggest that deploying convincing counter-narratives are a better means of convincing those we suspect of being susceptible to confirmation bias and conspiratorial types of thinking that there are better ways of understanding contemporary politics.