Tyler Cowen offers some ideas for how we can overcome confirmation bias, "the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses" per Wikipedia.
Cowen introduces the subject as follows:
Often readers send requests, and last week I was asked for “Good Rules to Avoid the Filter Bubble.” My correspondent meant, how to avoid reading too many of the people he agreed with, maintaining a balanced perspective in a time of increasing polarization. Of course, a “balanced” perspective isn’t always a more correct one (sometimes one side really does have more truth on its side). But still it seems valuable to understand the views of others, and to keep in mind the limitations of one’s own.The sad thing is, this isn’t as easy as it might sound.
He offers several suggestions. My
personal favorite is the ideological Turing test in which "you could write out the views of a Trump or Clinton
supporter, or of some other point of view contrary to your own, in a way that
would be indistinguishable from the writings of supporters." I also rely
on Arnold Kling's Three Languages of Politics because I think his model helps
identify the main focus liberals, conservatives and libertarians use when expressing
and defending their positions. (Quick summary. Liberals talk about the
oppressed/oppressors. Conservatives refer to civilization vs. barbarism while
libertarians see things in terms of rights versus coercion.)
For a more detailed analysis of confirmation bias and other factors that affect our ability to be objective check out Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker.
