CMNH Confirmation Bias Exhibit

Overview

This project was made by Joyce Chen, Mimi Niou, Nikhil Lingireddy, Sean Moore, and Emilio Vargas for Professor Marti Louw's Spring 2017 Learning Media Methods class. Our project is an exhibit concept for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History's upcoming Anthropocene exhibit.

What is confirmation bias?

"If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories." -Karl Popper

"People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for." -Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Problem Statement

Each and every one of us suffers from confirmation bias, which is a tendency to selectively look for or interpret evidence as supporting one’s prior beliefs. In relation to the Anthropocene in particular, individuals may be prone to disbelieve or dismiss scientific theories and evidence that go against their desires or ways of thinking.

Our Vision

Our exhibit teaches the concept of confirmation bias by having visitors role-play examples of the concept, reflect on the activity to understand how confirmation bias was demonstrated, and then respond to a prompt about personal experiences with confirmation bias. Our exhibit is targeted towards museum visitors... particularly visitors in groups of 2 or more. Visitors should leave our exhibit with a better understanding of the definition of confirmation bias, what they are more prone to believe, as well as how confirmation bias affects common decision-making.

User Studies

We conducted heavy user testing to understand more about museum visitors. In particular, we wanted to learn about their motivations for coming to a museum, how much they already knew about the Anthropocene, and any existing knowledge about confirmation bias. 

In the pictures below, you will find samples (both raw data and the analysis process) of our findings.

Prototyping

We worked through different stages of prototyping to develop our exhibit concept. 

Our general exhibit focuses on three main components: first, a role-play activity for visitors to perform in pairs; second, a reflection process to help synthesize understanding of confirmation bias; and finally, a response board for visitors to think about personal experiences with confirmation bias. 

The pictures below are snapshots from different stages in the prototyping process. These include initial brainstorming, early story-boarding, user testing, as well as the prototypes themselves.

Exhibit Recommendations 

We recommend that the Confirmation Bias exhibit pursues 2 major objectives:

1) Ensure that users understand the concept of confirmation bias. 

One of our primary goals was to teach visitors confirmation bias beyond just a simple definition. Because of this, we focused on the role-play experience to provide examples of confirmation bias and help visitors experience the concept in a realistic, Anthropocene-related discussion. 

2) Build awareness of confirmation bias

This goal is harder to quantify, but our response board was directed to promote visitor perspective and awareness of confirmation bias. Specifically, we wanted visitors to understand how confirmation bias affects their personal experiences and decision-making.

These two goals are the objectives that we prioritized most during our concept development. Further recommendations, if CMNH plans to extend on our concept, include:

• making characters more relatable
  
• providing different levels of engagement
  
• focusing the activity for either facilitated or un-facilitated use
  

Final Reflections

Review Session Critiques

During the review session, we received very helpful critiques for future iterations of our exhibit concept and prototype. Some of the responses heard during the review session include:

• How can these activities be presented to younger audiences?
  
• Can there be a physical take-away that visitors can revisit at home?
  
• How can we improve the overall packaging of the experience?
  

These are all excellent as potential extensions of our project, and they serve as very useful suggestions if this exhibit concept is to reach further development stages.

What We Learned

From our progress throughout this course, we have gained several important lessons regarding our project and the overall experience. People tend to enjoy role-playing, but it is also important for stories to be relatable in order to most effectively promote learning. Our activity helped all groups learn more about confirmation bias, and visitors all agreed that they knew more about the concept after going through our activities. Finally, as a lesson to any future design or prototyping experience, we found that small changes in protocol can greatly affect visitor experience. 

Moving Forward

There are many areas of our project that could be better refined. Some of these areas were limitations by the class structure (for example, a 6-week mini instead of a full-semester course), but some of these are also specific to our final exhibit concept and prototype. Moving forward, our specific aspirations would be to:

• precisely refine the reflection prompt and dialogues (which would require more stages of user testing than this half-semester allowed time for)
  
• working out the balance between facilitated and un-facilitated aspects (again, requiring more testing than we could finish in time)
  
• create a dialogue or activity targeted to younger audiences
  
• leave visitors with a home take-away or memento

Given these areas of potential improvement, we still strongly support and recommend our exhibit concept and design to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. For further documentation about our project, feel free to contact any of the students involved, or check out our blog at https://medium.com/bias-and-the-anthropocene.

Thank you to Professor Louw, Teaching Assistant Yiran Buckley, and all guest speakers and CMNH staff who helped make this project possible