So, why does it happen and why do we do it?
In the video, the speaker references research from 2007 by a number of authors, from a paper titled “Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White-Male Effect in Risk Perception.”
This term: Identity-Protective Cognition, while used in the above-mentioned paper to refer to what the authors call the white-male effect, can be extended to the “upside” of confirmation bias in all humans.
The bottom line: we don’t interpret information objectively. We use the logical parts of our brains (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) when we’re biased for something, and the emotional parts of our brains (the orbitofrontal cortex), when we’re biased against something. And, one main reason why we do it is to protect our own identities, whatever those identities might be comprised of.