At the same time, cognitive biases can cause mistakes in our thinking, too.
This 'automatic process' allows us to conserve mental energy that we could use for things that are more complicated.
You don't need to re-learn your path from home to work or school every day it’s become so ingrained in your mind that you can follow it almost without thinking. Normally, these shortcuts make our lives easier. This section explains how cognitive biases operate-what goes in inside people's heads that makes us more likely to fall for fake news, and for us to continue to believe false information even after it's been corrected.Ĭognitive biases result from the automatic mental shortcuts that humans naturally take on a daily basis. A cognitive bias is a gap in reasoning, remembering, or evaluating something that can lead to mistaken conclusions. This is due to a feature of human thinking called cognitive biases.
Why do people fall prey to fake news stories? Can't they just tell when they come across them? Having such easy access to real facts and fact checkers surely takes care of the problem, right? Unfortunately, part of the reason that fake news is such a problem is that people do fall for these stories, and being shown the facts doesn’t help correct this problem.
