Confirmation bias
You know how you’re always right and everyone who disagrees with you is either stupid or in denial? Yeah, there’s a reason for that. It’s called confirmation bias - a simple little term that basically means people can’t stand being wrong and will selectively acknowledge information that makes them appear correct and ignore everything else because fuck that. With confirmation bias, anyone who is adamant about unearthing a certain “fact” will find it. With blinders on and direction chosen, the evidence they need appears everywhere, not because the predetermined resolution they want is necessarily correct, but because every counterargument that diminishes their standing is tossed aside, whether willfully or subconsciously - after all, people spend their entire lives justifying their opinions by befriending like-minded people and listening to journalists who “get it.” You’re not out there looking for information. You’re out there looking for confirmation.
Confirmation bias is fairly harmless until you let it distort your thinking when faced with a question or dilemma, because you're not actually looking for the answer. You've already decided what the answer is. Now you just need to figure out which bits of information confirms this result while conveniently not noticing the other facts that may contradict what you believe must be true. You may elect to go even further and conjure up hypotheticals that arrive at your desired outcome and voila! Proof! And a swell of validation washes over you as you triumphantly survey the "evidence" you've "deduced" with "logic" to come to the “correct” answer that - well wadda you know! - is congruent with the position you’ve always held. Sploosh.
It would be easy to tell you to just wake the hell up. To stop being afraid of all facts that drill holes through the filter of how you want to see the world. To question everything. To question yourself. But that seems super exhausting. Confirmation bias is everyday life, present in the decisions you make; in the people you surround yourself with; in the TV shows you watch. But maybe the next time you read an article or some stupid viral share and you find yourself nodding like an idiot, try to not be satisfied with being spoon-fed exactly what you wanted to digest. Instead, try to come up with evidence that disproves the points being made - no matter how much this rattles your lifetime’s worth of reinforcement. And if you’re actually, honestly unable to shoot it all down, then congrats! You just read and fully understood a fact or valid point. Feel free to start nodding like an idiot. Sploosh.