Confirmation bias
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. People tend to unconsciously select information that supports their views, but ignoring non-supportive information. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs.
About Confirmation bias in brief
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. People tend to unconsciously select information that supports their views, but ignoring non-supportive information. People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. They differ from what is sometimes called the behavioral confirmation effect, commonly known as self-fulfilling prophecy, in which a person’s expectations influence their own behavior, bringing about the expected result. In social media, confirmation bias is amplified by the use of filter bubbles, or \”algorithmic editing\”, which displays to individuals only information they are likely to agree with, while excluding opposing views. Flawed decisions due to these biases have been found in political, organizational, financial and scientific contexts. For example, a police detective may identify a suspect early in an investigation, but then may only seek confirming rather than disconfirming evidence. People look for the consequences that they would expect if their hypothesis were true, rather than what would happen if they were false. People prefer this type of question, called a positive test, even when a negative test such as \”Is it an even number?\” would yield exactly the same information.
However, this does not mean that people seek tests that guarantee a positive answer, since positive tests can be highly informative in itself. The way you phrased a question can significantly change the answer. For people who are asked, ‘Are you happy with your behavior?’ can change the way you answer the question significantly. This is the way the answer can be significantly changed with a change in the phrasing of a question. Thus, the search for evidence in favor of a hypothesis is likely to succeed, but not to succeed to succeed in any other way. In real-world situations, evidence is often complex and mixed, so concentrating on one aspect of his or her behavior could be supported by concentrating on various contradictory ideas about someone else’s behavior as well. The results of studies where subjects could either select such pseudo-tests, or genuinely diagnostic ones, mean that they favored the ones they favored, such as ‘Is it a 3’ over ‘An odd number’ or ‘The answer is a 3,’ rather than the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 28,. 28, 29, 30, 31, 28. : 177–78. A report on a meta-analysis by William Hart and colleagues of research about whether exposure to information is guided by defence motives or by accuracy motives adopts the term “congeniality bias” rather than confirmation bias.
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This page is based on the article Confirmation bias published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
