Role bias overcommitting to your own point of view and interpreting information in self-serving ways.
Not everyone interprets information in the same way, and how our world is perceived differs from person to person.
We want to be fair, but we fail to recognize we're interpreting information in a biased, self-serving manner.
And they tend to interpret information in a hyperliteral way, using "a kind of language which does not seem intended to serve interpersonal communication".
One problem is that we're wired to search for and interpret information in a way that reinforces our beliefs and values.
Because attitudes on climate change (in the US at least) are strongly associated with partisan leanings, individuals are more likely to "pay attention to and interpret information in ways that reinforce their partisan views".
They include overconfidence in our decision-making ability; interpreting information in a way that confirms our beliefs; loss aversion, which stops us selling a poor investment for fear of "locking in" the loss; and inertia.
Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC), the British tax agency, has recently employed organizational psychologists, who help analytics teams improve their interpretive abilities by, for example, making them aware of their confirmatory biases: their tendencies to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms preconceptions.
Other "irrational" phenomena include confirmation bias (searching for or interpreting information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions), the bandwagon effect (doing things because others do them) and framing problems (when the conclusion reached depends on the way the data are presented).
Essentially, it relies on our inherent tendency to interpret information in a way that confirms our biases: its practitioners play to what we want to hear, to lead us unwittingly away from reality, simultaneously undermining the confidence and critical capacity we require to "return home".
