Talk:Confirmation bias

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Should the references perhaps be made in APA format? They don't seem to be at the moment...

confirmation bias

Wason abandonded his confirmation bias account of the card selection task, in favor of the Matching Bias...so something needs to change.

The notion that the scientific method of falsification was invented "to compensate for this observed human tendency" is just plain nonsense. --Arno Matthias 14:51, 8 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Whom ever added it might be confusing it with doing double blind studies to minimise bias? David D. (Talk) 16:50, 15 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Probably. Falsficationism has better philosophical justifications than just compensating for us being human, after all. -- Gwern (contribs) 16:54, 15 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

deleted material

I deleted interesting, but verbatum text copied from the Scientific American Skeptic column published in July 2006 titled The Political Brain - A recent brain-imaging study shows that our political predilections are a product of unconscious confirmation bias by Michael Shermer. This content needs to be rewritten and cited. David D. (Talk) 22:32, 2 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If the participants in the study were strong partisans (of either party), it is probable that they already knew the political messages they were asked to assess. So why should they have recurred to reasoning instead of emotions, if what they heard was nothing new to them?

polarization effect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarization_effect seems to be related to confirmation bias — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sgeiger (talk • contribs)

need for cognitive closure

This article needs to go into an explanation of how the confirmation bias does not effect everyone equally, but is largely influenced by situational pressures and by individual attributes. I'm not a psychology student so I can't write it, but I know for example that Webster & Kruglanski's Need for Closure Scale is one method used to determine an individual's need for cognitive closure and thus how susceptable they are to confirmation bias. Daniel 13:29, 27 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

merge article: myside bias?

It appears that the article myside bias largely overlaps with this article. I proposed merging the article into this one. Another article to merge it with could be disconfirmation bias.

JuhazOne 23:18, 20 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

They do look to be the same thing. If a source can be cited to that effect, then I agree that they should be merged. Ruakh 23:28, 20 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. I would remove myside bias and just merge it here. Marky48 03:32, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. Confirmation bias is the basic phenomenon. Jeremy Tobacman 01:47, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

They should be merged, but there is much more merging yet to be done. Grumpyyoungman01 12:38, 3 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Big merger proposal

These are all obviously the same article under different names with different etymologies and different text. A term such as 'belief preservation' can take into account both 'confirmation' and 'disconfirmation' bias. But I see no need for a distinction in article titles between confirmation and disconfirmation, particularly as it is part of the same psychological process. More pages link to this article. We shouldn't mention all of the possible names for the cognitive bias in the introduction in the single merged article, only some, and have a naming section to systematically deal with the rest. Grumpyyoungman01 12:50, 3 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. Firstly, I'm not convinced that confirmation bias and disconfirmation are really part of the same process. Secondly, this proposal is way too vague for me to consider voting for it: exactly which articles are you saying should be merged? What should be the title of the resulting article? Will the resulting article discuss the differences, or just pretend that the terms are synonyms? —Ruakh_TALK 20:07, 3 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. Confirmation and disconfirmation bias are part of the same process, just two different aspects of it, but complimentary and should be in the same article. For instance, straight from the wikipedia policy page on mergers, 'flammable' and 'non-flammable' should be combined in a page on flammability. From the disconfirmation page: "Disconfirmation bias refers to the tendency for people to extend critical scrutiny to information which contradicts their prior beliefs and uncritically accept information that is congruent with their prior beliefs.", They are confirming their prior held opinions. They do this in two ways, one is to uncritically accept congruent information and the other is to critically assess contradictory information. Both of these are opposite sides of the same coin. The coin of mainting your belief/s regardless of an objective analysis of the evidence.

The articles that should be merged into this article are shown on the template at the top of this article. The title of the resulting page shall be Confirmation bias because this is the most comphrehensive page of the many dealing with the same thing and has many internal links pointing to it. If you think another name is appropriate, then after the merge, if it happens, you can suggest another name. At the moment I don't think that the name is important. The article would discuss the differences between the initial articles, which mainly revolve around who coined what terms and did what research when in a "naming" section or something like that.

In the merge itself, if it happens, no information should be lost that appeared on any original page, it would all be placed down and it would need some working out over a few days or weeks. Of course the current pages will not be deleted, a redirect will be left and the page history will be accessible. Grumpyyoungman01 09:53, 5 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Disconfirmation bias.

Disconfirmation bias was recently merged here, despite there not being a clear consensus about this (since it was rather mixed with the discussion of merging Myside bias). What do people think? Should Disconfirmation bias have its own article, or not? My vote is that it should; Grumpyyoungman01's is obviously that it should not. —Ruakh_TALK 15:48, 8 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

As the only significant editor of disconfirmation bias has not edited WP for 18 months Special:Contributions/Taak and as there doesn't seem to be much activity on this page from other users, I suggest that you contact people involved Wikipedia:WikiProject Psychology. Otherwise I can just see two of us here and no consensus. Grumpyyoungman01 23:21, 8 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Pseudoscience

Can anyone justify why this article is categorised as Pseudoscience? Grumpyyoungman01 23:18, 8 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Real life example of confirmation bias

I've posted a quote from Sen. Sam Brownback if which he incurs on a confirmation bias. Quote from [1] --Loren 10:41, 1 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a fantastic example of Confirmation Bias on a huge scale. Discussion of what is needed to outline this? Happy to start things off. --BadCop666 08:40, 28 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Political study is not confirmation bias

I wouldn't classify the political bias study as a study of confirmation bias, but a different bias phenomenon. In the Wason experiment, subjects were given a chance to test their hypotheses, and the choices they made showed the confirmatory bias. The study involving quotes from Bush and Kerry didn't require subjects to choose an information source or test their own hypotheses: it was more about interpretation and justification. The political bias study could be moved to another cognitive bias page, as it concerns motivated rationality, cognitive dissonance or similar. MartinPoulter 11:45, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think that both are indeed confirmation bias, but it's possible that confirmation bias is really two distinct things. Mirosław Kofta et al's Personal Control in Action: Cognitive and Motivational Mechanisms writes of "the two concurrently used and often confused meanings of the ‘confirmation bias’—tendentious handling of evidence and a confirmatory strategy of hypothesis testing" (pages 234–5). We can try to make the distinction more clear in the article, but I don't think we can move it to an entirely different page. —Ruakh_TALK 13:32, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for this, I was unaware of that reference. It would be a good idea to mention the two kinds. I still think there will be a lot of overlap between an entry on motivated-biased-evaluation-of-evidence and cognitive dissonance. MartinPoulter 20:29, 8 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]