Confirmation bias is the tendency to favor information that confirms one’s beliefs or hypotheses. There are really two ways that we can exhibit this bias. The first is by selectively gathering information that is we only seek out data that would serve to support a hypothesis and fail to seek out data that might disprove the hypothesis. The second is by selectively interpreting information. This happens when we only focus on data that supports our hypothesis even when we have data that refutes it.

As data analysts, we try our best to remain objective and avoid both of these traps.