Nicely argued. Thank you. However: it is applicable only to your selectively narrow definition of 'confirmation bias' which, per W'pedia, for example, is "the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values."
I think that four-pronged definition just goes to show that the term ‘confirmation bias’ has been used to refer to multiple different things by different people, creating a literature of disparate findings that are not well unified.
Despite (or perhaps because of) being widely studied, the literature on confirmation bias is highly confused. The term ‘confirmation bias’ has been used to refer to various different tendencies by different people, and it’s not clear how these different tendencies relate to one another. Some supposedly well-established effects do not appear to hold up under closer scrutiny (including selective exposure - the tendency to seek out belief-confirming information). Other findings - such as those from Wason’s seminal work on hypothesis testing - have been interpreted as providing evidence for confirmation bias when they in fact show something subtly but importantly different. Going deeper still, there is a real lack of clarity around what it means to be ‘biased’ or ‘irrational’, from which subtle but important disagreements arise. All this casts doubt upon the questions of how, and even whether, we should be trying to ‘improve’ human reasoning by reducing confirmation bias.
Nicely argued. Thank you. However: it is applicable only to your selectively narrow definition of 'confirmation bias' which, per W'pedia, for example, is "the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values."
Thanks!
I think that four-pronged definition just goes to show that the term ‘confirmation bias’ has been used to refer to multiple different things by different people, creating a literature of disparate findings that are not well unified.
Despite (or perhaps because of) being widely studied, the literature on confirmation bias is highly confused. The term ‘confirmation bias’ has been used to refer to various different tendencies by different people, and it’s not clear how these different tendencies relate to one another. Some supposedly well-established effects do not appear to hold up under closer scrutiny (including selective exposure - the tendency to seek out belief-confirming information). Other findings - such as those from Wason’s seminal work on hypothesis testing - have been interpreted as providing evidence for confirmation bias when they in fact show something subtly but importantly different. Going deeper still, there is a real lack of clarity around what it means to be ‘biased’ or ‘irrational’, from which subtle but important disagreements arise. All this casts doubt upon the questions of how, and even whether, we should be trying to ‘improve’ human reasoning by reducing confirmation bias.