An Exercise on Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias seems to be the most dangerous of social cognition biases, simply put, confirmation bias is the tendency to search for information that will prove a preconceived belief and overlooking information that does not conform to the presumption. Carroll defines confirmation bias as “…a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and to look for what confirms one's beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts one's beliefs (“The Skeptic’s Dictionary,” 2002).” This manner of thinking could lead to other cognition biases such as belief perseverance and overconfidence bias, to name just a couple. Moreover, confirmation bias can trap a person to believing that he/she is right just because the person never even tried to disprove his/her hypothesis. Becoming accustomed to this method of thinking may lead to a lifetime of ignorance, now isn’t that just poor?PROBLEM: Do people display confirmation bias in choosing a set of questions that will possibly give information verifying their beliefs instead of choosing a set that could disprove their suspicions? METHOD: Participants were 44 UP Diliman students, mostly and preferably psychology majors
Data for the main results (in Appendix D with calculations) was tested with a c² test for independence. At a=.05, df=1 the value for c²=0.93 and with a critical c² of 3.841, this value was not significant. This meant that the participants’ response to the questionnaire did not depend on the condition described. Again, it cannot be concluded that confirmation bias was displayed. REFLECTION: I think that this experiment is a great exercise for us to observe confirmation bias. Although the samples in both studies generally did not show the bias at work, I saw that confirmation bias was working in the experimenters; well at least I can say that for myself (and maybe the teacher). As seen in the discussion part of this report, this experimenter attempted to explain the reasons for the confirmation bias not being affirmed by the experiment. Jelecic and Merckelbach (2002), cite Chinn and Brewer about science students discounting findings that are contradictory to their beliefs. I can only guess that not only this student tried to downplay the negative results of the two studies, in trying to retain that the psychologically accepted fact that people generally display the confirmation bias. Also evident is that the class tried to prove, after the disappointing results of the first study, that confirmation bias can be predicted by the same experiment but now with a revised method: give the participants only two choices, one that will confirm their suspicion and another that will try to only disprove their suspicion. Still, this was to no avail.
Some topics in this essay:
METHOD Participants,
II METHOD,
Set Set,
Maybe Set,
Chinn Brewer,
ESP Gilovich,
Skeptic’s Dictionary”,
,
confirmation bias,
Study II,
set questions,
manipulation check,
biased thinking,
c² test,
Jelecic Merckelbach,
data calculations appendix,
calculations appendix,
method participants,
thinking lead,
data calculations,
psychology majors,
results manipulation iv,
expected results manipulation,
manipulation iv effective,
observed expected results,
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Approximate Word count = 1837
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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