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Confirmation bias, also known asobservational selection,motivated reasoning, orthe enumeration of favorable circumstances, is the tendency for people to (consciously orunconsciously) seek out information that conforms to their pre-existing view points, and subsequently ignore information that goes against them, both positive and negative. It is a type ofcognitive bias and a form ofselection bias toward confirmation of thehypothesis under study. Avoiding confirmation bias is an important part ofrationalism and inscience in general. This is achieved by setting up problems so that you must find ways ofdisproving your hypothesis (seefalsifiability).

Everyone does it[edit]

Confirmation bias is one of the traits that just comes with the human condition. There is a human tendency to favour testing the predictions of a hypothesis that only confirm or prove it, at the expense of testing any predictions that would disprove a hypothesis. This is a problem because attempts to disprove a hypothesis are the most effective ways of comparing two or more hypotheses, and are also the most informative methods for acquiring evidence. However, even practicing scientists often miss these examples and thescientific method has basically "evolved" to try and counteract it.

In politics, confirmation bias explains, for example, why people withright-wing views buy right-wing newspapers and why people with left-wing views buy left-wing newspapers (creatingecho chambers). In general, people both:

• Want to be exposed to information and opinions that confirm what they already believe.
• Have a desire to ignore, or not be exposed to, information or opinions that challenge what they already believe.

Even in cases where peopledo expose themselves to alternative points of view, it may be a form of confirmation bias, in that they want to confirm that the opposition is, indeed, wrong.

Intelligent design[edit]

A prime example stems from theintelligent design andcreationism movements. Proponents of these ideas start by assuming that an intelligent creator must have been behind life (often assuming theChristian god) and then seeking out any (and only) evidence that might back up this claim. For example,Answers in Genesis often claims thatfossils in the ground are proof of aglobal flood and that layering is caused by the relative abilities ofanimals to reach higher grounds. They quote evidence which shows thathumans and otherprimates are on top ofdinosaurs in thegeological record and claim that this is because we "could climb to higher points on the landscape".

However, they never address any evidence that might disconfirm this hypothesis, such as why angiosperm plants and their pollen is never found below vascular fern fossils, or why we see absolute cut-offs in the fossil record rather than astatistical tendency, which the "climbing" hypothesis would suggest. (In other words, why weren't there some weak or elderly humans who died with the dinosaurs?) Thefossil record is in fact best explained bycommon descent, but this is ignored through confirmation bias by creationists.

Creationists, along a similar vein, claim that "evolutionists" are practicing confirmation bias, sincethey are all atheists out to distort the scientific record to make it look like God does not exist. This claim is, of courseblatantly false: the existence of people who believe intheistic evolution disproves it. Furthermore, not all scientists areatheists, and additionallyold-earth andevolutionary theories were developed by consideringnew observations rather than dismissing the old ones. It is, however, true that allYoung-Earthers aretheistic (as their only real reason for their stance is clinging toa literal interpretation ofavery old book thatasserted several "facts" that rational, properly-educated people in the modern day would know to be incorrect).^{[citation NOT needed]}

See also[edit]

External links[edit]

• David McRaney,Confirmation bias (youarenotsosmart.com, 23-June 2010)
• Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler.When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions (pdf) (Political Behavior, 2006)

References[edit]

• Bronze-level articles
• Psychology
• Logic
• Cognitive biases
• Philosophy of science

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