Self-Confirmation

Was chatting with a friend online when I used the term "self-confirmation", imbued with the concept of seeking to confirm one's own self-worth to one's self. However context and facial expressions don't travel so well over Facebook chat, and I wasn't sure at all that I was using the right term, which is to say that I had come up with it on the spot. Anyway, googled it - it appears to be a psychological term which the below excerpt from this article discusses.

The tremendous fear and publicity right now about swine flu is out of proportion with the actual number of deaths (however sad these individual cases may be). Apparently, during the 1990s approximately 36,000 people died each year due to the flu in the United States. So the current number of deaths, which is in the low hundreds, pales in comparison.

“Self Confirmation” [is] where we ignore data that does not support our fear, and only embrace data that does back our contentions. A good example would be the failure to think about the greater number of people who die from normal flu outbreaks instead of the swine flu.

Thought it was pretty interesting as the word is tied in with the (not so current) panic over swine-flu.