How to find the truth in a sea of information

Cognitive biases are a result of your brain’s attempt to simplify information processing. Basically, they’re mental shortcuts that, in our efforts to cope with too much information, end up distorting our judgment.

There are many cognitive bias examples, but a few you might already be familiar with include:

• Confirmation bias — the tendency to absorb information that already closely aligns with our opinion
• Optimism bias — we overestimate the likelihood of good things happening to us and minimize a potential negative outcome

Dependence on social media as a news source can also be a source of bias. “Many individuals rely on social media as a news source. We need to take a step back and inspect the information with a more careful eye,” Bean advises. "In this day and age with TikTok and AI, people’s posts will be duplicated, information will be stolen, and information that we believe comes from a reliable source may not be so. We need to investigate who the author is.”

A key emphasis of Bean’s work is the importance of informational awareness despite being surrounded by constant bias.

There are many different biases in the world, including biases in research and biases in hiring.

For his part, Bean focuses on information selection, and in his book, he identifies seven primary sources of bias:

1. Academic: Schools, colleges and universities might introduce bias through pressure to publish or get specific results in their research.
2. Hidden agenda (AI): This source of bias refers to an entity or individual that covertly promotes a goal. Social media companies, like TikTok and Facebook, are often accused of having hidden agendas when it comes to privacy issues.
3. For profit: As businesses are motivated by profit, their goal often (unsurprisingly) is to influence people to buy their products.
4. Nonprofit: Nonprofit organizations, such as churches, temples and community groups, might be motivated to present a one-sided view of issues to promote specific action regarding a certain cause.
5. Watchdog groups: These groups exist to hold other groups accountable. Often, they are organized as nonprofits and might harbor any number of biases or hidden agendas.
6. Government: From the local to federal levels, governments might exhibit bias through hidden agendas, propaganda or censorship.
7. Individuals: Every individual has personal biases that subtly influence how they interpret and communicate information.

To put KLEMP into practice, select a news story from your social media feed and evaluate it based on the five factors. Starting with Kairos, ask when the information was published. Was it last week or last year?

Next, examine Logos to determine if the data contains facts or statistics from reliable sources.

Then, evaluate the Ethos and Mythos to get a feel for the writer’s beliefs, agenda and level of expertise.

Finally, is the information driven by emotion (Pathos) or facts?

In Bias Is All Around You, Bean explains that information that demonstrates less bias could be timely, data-driven and unemotional. At the other end of the spectrum, highly biased information is driven mainly by emotion, is not timely and has no documented facts. Where does your social media news story fall on the spectrum?

To make his bias-fighting resources more accessible, Bean has created a website, BiasHandbook.com, where free tools, like a downloadable Bias Assessment Form, are available.

While taking the extra time for information inspection might deter some, Bean asserts it is a necessary practice. “As Tim Voss [of Michigan State University] said in my book’s foreword, inspecting information takes time. It’s like exercise, and, you know, I try to get my 10,000 steps in every day, but I don’t always love to do it.”

Like getting in our daily walk, taking a moment each morning to evaluate our diet of information (and weed out what’s not so good for us, especially in big quantities) is essential for our mental health.