You want to be right, right?

“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion

draws all things else to support and agree with it.”
-- Francis Bacon

You want to be right about how you see the world, so you seek out information which confirms your beliefs and avoid contradictory evidence and opinions, journalist David McRaney writes. This is called "confirmation bias."

If you are thinking about buying a new car, you suddenly see people driving them all over the roads. If you just ended a long-time relationship, every song you hear seems to be written about love. If you are having a baby, you start to see them everywhere.
Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter, thinking selectively.

McRaney points out how we willing use confirmation bias, particularly in the way we look at the news.

Punditry is a whole industry built on confirmation bias. Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck and Arianna Huffington, Rachel Maddow and Ann Coulter – these people provide fuel for beliefs, they pre-filter the world to match existing world-views. If their filter is like your filter, you love them. If it isn’t, you hate them. Whether or not pundits are telling the truth, or vetting their opinions, or thoroughly researching their topics is all beside the point. You watch them not for information, but for confirmation.

I know this is true, because I deliberately seek out The Onion to confirm my biases about how the world works. McRaney concludes:

Over time, by never seeking the antithetical, through accumulating subscriptions to magazines, stacks of books and hours of television, you can become so confident in your world-view no one could dissuade you. Remember, there’s always someone out there willing to sell eyeballs to advertisers by offering a guaranteed audience of people looking for validation. Ask yourself if you are in that audience. In science, you move closer to the truth by seeking evidence to the contrary. Perhaps the same method should inform your opinions as well.

“Thanks to Google, we can instantly seek out support for the most bizarre idea imaginable. 

If our initial search fails to turn up the results we want, we don’t give it a second thought, 

rather we just try out a different query and search again.”
- Justin Owings