Have you seen the Cruella Deville movie yet? So good. I’m always fascinated with a good origin story. I have some metrics I use when watching movies, a few rules I apply on whether the story is categorized as good or not. And this is part of how I raised my children to critically think about the media – the books and movies and entertainment they take in – I wanted my children to be able to discern between heroes and heroines to look up to, or whether to dismiss them even though the story might be entertaining.

And so with that set up, let’s first talk about the metrics I use. And this comes from a philosophy I used when homeschooling my children for seven years – we applied the style of literary analysis promoted by Daniel Taylor in his book, The Healing Power of Stories, we applied his framework to how we would discuss literature.

The art of telling a good story is powerful. Stories and characters add meaning to our lives and can remind...

When I hear the word bias, I think of either news organizations that slant their coverage to favor one political position over another or racial prejudice.

I learned about cognitive bias in my psychology courses in college —the collection of faulty ways of thinking that is apparently hardwired into the human brain. The collection is large. Wikipedia’s “List of cognitive biases” contains 185 entries, that is a significant amount!

Some of the biases are not a big deal at all, like the Ikea effect, for instance, which is defined as “the tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves.” I know this one all too well.

But If I had to single out a particular bias as the most pervasive and damaging, it would probably be confirmation bias. That’s the effect that leads us to look for evidence confirming what we already think or suspect, to view facts...