You’ve probably heard of confirmation bias, “the tendency to seek out, interpret, and recall information in ways that validate what we already believe.”

Confirmation bias isn’t just a psychological quirk. It’s everywhere, baked into the technologies we use every day.

Our digital world, from social algorithms to AI, is built to reinforce it. Your feed is tuned in to your worldview. Google Gemini autocompletes your sentences like it already knows how you think. Even ChatGPT, impressive as it is, is trained on the collective biases of the internet. Ask it for something new, and unless you seriously intervene, you’ll often get something back that’s uncannily... familiar.

These tools aren't broken. They're doing exactly what they’re designed to do: serve us what we know.

And that’s the problem.

Confirmation bias doesn’t just help us feel more certain and comfortable—it narrows our field of view. It makes unfamiliar ideas harder to notice, let alone explore. And when that bias seeps into our work—especially into our approach to solving problems—it doesn’t spark creativity. We chase originality using recycled inputs. We trust solutions because they sound familiar. The thinking that already “feels right.” A filtered loop of answers that echo what we’ve already heard.

Over time, this leads to a sense of stagnation—both in mindset and results. We ask the same colleagues the same questions, reference the same sources, default to the same answers. See the same outcomes. All because we’re more at ease with routine over the unknown.

But here’s the thing. New ideas rarely live inside your comfort zone.

The best ideas—the ones that shift industries, reveal new paths, solve real business problems—tend to come from tension. From cross-pollinated thinking and unexpected collisions of people, disciplines, and skillsets. That’s where invention lives.

It’s also why agencies like ours exist.

“The world [is] a set of puzzle pieces to snap together in the creation of new initiatives.” — Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson

At Fiction Tribe, we’ve built a model around snapping those puzzle pieces together. Our Studios bring forward diverse experience and expertise across five core disciplines: Strategy, Narrative, Design, Motion, and Development.

We don’t just execute—we challenge your assumptions and reframe your perspectives. Though, we don’t chase novelty for its own sake. We believe that seeing things differently is the first step to a better solve. In a world designed to feed you what you already believe, we choose to think otherwise.