Social Validation as Motivation for Confirmation Bias

The desire for social acceptance motivates bias as the need for validation to feel socially accepted and secured, both physically and in a virtual environment, can control individual perception. Social ventures overpower factual information and triggers confirmation bias as social validation grants emotional security against the growing trend of social cruelty.

Emotional and Social Stability

A study in social psychology suggests that “belonging is primal, a fundamental to our sense of happiness," and “isolation, loneliness and low social status can harm a person's subjective sense of well-being.” With the posing social threats, people base their positions on news where they could earn acceptance or a sense of belonging. Letting emotional validation to control perception, it becomes imperative for people to prioritize affiliation and fulfill the need to belong. As social and emotional stability are established through social acceptance, people’s positionalities are then solidified based on the majority force they chose to affiliate themselves with, making them susceptible to confirmation bias in their efforts to remain in their chosen circle.

Eventually, people are convinced that their collective ideology in their groups are in fact true mainly because of the support that implies a form of correctness with their stand. It provides a sense of validation and creates conviction within themselves that their views are accurate, and thus eliminating an independent judgement. Becoming a member of a group empowers an individual to stand firm with the group’s beliefs alone. At this point, individuals tend to agree on news solely because their affiliates do and let their controlled peers to take over their judgement, views, and manner of consuming news.

Social Development and Communal Bias

“A key theme in social psychology is that people are biased by their pre-existing beliefs and desires” and it is the desire “to belong” that plays as a major influence for people’s tendency to be bias. The desire for social belonging usually starts in the adolescent period, which is the stage for people to form an identity and to develop social skills and connections. During this stage, people are more aware of their emotions and seek ways to achieve a sense of happiness.

Finding a shared interest, individuals form a bond and a shared identity that fulfill the desire for psychological pleasure. Successfully developing connections and affiliations form groups and establish a uniformed view that pre-determines correct information based on the groups’ shared ideas, and information that disagree on their beliefs are immediately discredited for inaccuracy, which creates a narrow, controlled view that can grow into a long-term case of partisan bias.

Conformity for Emotional Security

Social dominance posts as an underlying context for people to reason with themselves whether to seek an alliance or to become independent, with the latter being a less preference over group acceptance. For example, the social aspect of politics is a starting point where people must choose whom to affiliate themselves with, starting a pondering period whether people should choose a political view that they truly believe or where they can benefit socially and emotionally.

Though political views are subjective based on varying individual reasons and independent perceptions, receiving a positive or negative response could control the political peers as people often resort to choose a political view where they receive more support from and gain acceptance, the support can come from friends, colleagues, or from organizations they are involved with. In some cases, individual political views are still pursued only to be overthrown later by a majority ruling where the view that received the most praises wins, as validation creates contentment.

Social Media Dependency: Virtual Social Survival Through Bias

People utilize social media not only to publicize their lives but also to promote their beliefs and, under the influence of confirmation bias, share news that they only believe, which can have an impact on news accuracy due to the filtered manner in spreading news. A research about “social media addiction” cited the Uses and Gratification Theory, which “states that people are motivated to seek out forms of media to satisfy their psychological and social needs (West & Turner, 2007).”

As the theory suggests, people rely heavily on media platforms for social gratification, with social media having the most users. Social media users are rewarded or cursed with a great deal of social opportunities or threats. The online method of communicating makes people vulnerable to criticisms that can easily result to public humiliation due to the openness of the digital platform. An online discord can be just as equally humiliating and degrading as a public verbal altercation, with the online counterpart earning the top spot for its ability to provide worldwide coverage and fast news release.

Virtually, users can receive instant praises or become susceptible to criticisms from simply expressing one’s thought or disagreeing with someone else’s position about an issue that can lead users to fall into a cyber warfare. Engaging in online confrontation is enough to cause mental and emotional stress that trigger “the survival mechanism called fight-or-flight” that often leads an individual to concede to the most dominating force, by will or pressure. It then becomes a desire for people to conform to an idea with the most supporters for a lesser chance of receiving backlash or to have sufficient supporters that acts as a strong foundation in the events of facing oppositions.

With "more Americans getting their news from social media,” the channel is increasingly becoming the leading platform to source information from and, additionally, a powerful mass communication tool as the dependency with the medium continuously increases. A news source study found “about one-in-five U.S. adults say they often get news via social media, slightly higher than the share who often do so from print newspapers.” With this in mind, the high dependency in social media spreads and intensifies the effects of confirmation bias as the online platform can serve and reach millions of audience and consumers alike.

A Social Desire: Importance of Belonging

The significance to belong supports self-realization and satisfies the need for company through a shared ideology and the benefit of having a community. For example, college is the period for social development, it is “the critical stage for adolescent to fulfill companionship, affiliation, and connectedness,” and the failure to do so often resorts to isolation and social disappointment. This is why adults or the millennial age group, which is usually the majority age group in colleges, often falls easily to confirmation bias as college is where social affiliation becomes integral and that makes adults prone to succumbing to bias in their efforts to pursue companionship.

The reason why social inclusion appears to be substantial in social development and how it motivates confirmation bias is that it helps find one’s identity as “groups are not only founts of information during times of ambiguity, they also help us answer the existentially significant question, “Who am I?” A journal from the Asia Pacific Journal of Information Systems explains that “a desire is a conative state whether one wants to approach or avoid something” and people tend to seek for convenience to satisfy the ”desire to belong“ and avoid the consequences of being criticized or to be treated as an opposition, “seeking inclusion over exclusion, membership over isolation, and acceptance over rejection.”

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