Welcome to Citizendium - the Citizens' Compendium!

See something needing your input? Click here to Join us in providing quality, expert-guided information to the public for free!

Wednesday, November 14: November 2012 Monthly Donor Day. - Donate here - Monthly Donor Honor Roll

Confirmation bias

From Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium

Jump to: navigation, search
This article is a stub and thus not approved.
Main Article
Talk
Related Articles  [?]
Bibliography  [?]
External Links  [?]
 
This is a draft article, under development and not meant to be cited; you can help to improve it. These unapproved articles are subject to a disclaimer.

Confirmation bias is a type of selective, wishful thinking, and an example of cognitive dissonance, where a person searches for or interprets evidence or information that matches their existing beliefs or predictions and ignores information that contradicts this. In short: cherry picking your evidence to match your conclusion. It is at the root of many types of pseudoscience and pseudohistory. The technique of cold reading, combined with the Forer effect, is an example of how a person may use someone's confirmation bias - a person who goes to a psychic or spiritualist session is going to want, often desperately, to hear from their deceased friends and relatives, and are quite willing to suspend their disbelief and ignore mistakes because of the emotional importance the 'hits' have.

The current segmentation of political thought and opinion brought about by the popularity of political blogging has caused concern for some in that it allows people to feed their own confirmation biases a lot easier - a person can read a blog which mirrors their own ideology and beliefs and not be subjected to any differing views or evidence that doesn't support the ideological line.

Views
Personal tools