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	Confirmation bias is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Misplaced Pages community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do so.
	This article appeared on Misplaced Pages's Main Page as Today's featured article on July 23, 2010.
Article milestones Date Process Result September 29, 2009 Good article nominee Listed May 24, 2010 Peer review Reviewed July 6, 2010 Featured article candidate Promoted
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This article is written in American English, which has its own spelling conventions (color, defense, traveled) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

where is the 2-4-6 problem explanation?

. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.218.159.38 (talk) 15:11, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

It's in the History section. MartinPoulter (talk) 11:37, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

First sentence

Thank you Martin for the great job you're doing on this and on other articles. However, to me the first sentence of the article "to treat information preferentially" is not at all as clear as the old sentence "prefer information". You're native English, and I am not, and I understand that there are many subtleties in the English language that I miss. But the English wikipedia is also the big international wikipedia, and I would really appreciate if you would reconsider this sentence and change it back to "prefer information" - or maybe something different but more clear. PS I'm sorry I sound so formal in English because I am not a formal person at all... Lova Falk talk 16:06, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

Thank you, Lova Falk, for your kind words. A reviewer in the Featured Article Review wrote, "I'm not sure I'm fully happy with the starting paragraph. The first two sentences don't appear to be communicating the same concept, at least to me. The first relates a preference to types of information; the second regards how information is processed." In response to this, I changed the wording. I agree that even though it might be more accurate it is more clumsy and we need something better. I have suggested "...tendency to favor information that confirms their preconceptions..." and will see if that gets support. "Prefer" could be taken to simply mean "like", whereas what's meant is that people give a preferable treatment to some information and not others. I think "favor" has the connotation of not just liking something but giving it a better treatment. I'm keen to hear what others think. MartinPoulter (talk) 16:34, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm all in favor for favor. Lova Falk talk 16:40, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

FAC comments

I'm trying to help clear the backlog of FAC nominations. I'm working from the bottom of the list up. Here we go:

Thanks a lot for this set of helpful comments. Specific answers below. MartinPoulter (talk) 16:37, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

• Is this a sociological or psychological phenomenon? Can we state that in the first sentence of the lead? Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a sociological phenomenon where people favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses...

Definitely not sociological. The literature is mainly psychological, but it could be argued that this is a topic in inductive inference. For the sake of readability, I'm wary of loading the first sentence with too many clauses. This is above all an effect in how people process information. That's what the existing lead conveys.

• For example, various contradictory ideas about someone's personality could each be supported by looking at isolated things that he or she does. This is a tiny issue, and probably idiosyncratic, but I generally think "things" is too generic a word and try not to use it. I used to tell my students not to use it when they wrote, if only to force them to find a better word and be more descriptive. To express ideas that need to be very clear to readers, I think this is also applicable to this section in the article.

Good catch. I occasionally lapse into vague language and am glad to have it pointed out. This bit has been rephrased.

• the homosexual men in the set were more likely to report seeing buttocks or anuses in the ambiguous figures. That's hilarious. That kind of crazyass left field assumption makes me want to become a researcher.

It's what the subjects in the experiment thought, but they were objectively wrong. That's the surprising outcome of that research.

• It may be me, but I didn't understand the Klayman and Ha's critique section at all.

I've made another pass at rewording. Can you say more specifically what the difficulty is?

Seriously, probably me. I froth at the mouth at probability and statistics. --Moni3 (talk) 19:39, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

• The Informal observation section should be a cohesive paragraph instead of four one-sentence paragraphs.

I've put the first three sentences together.

• How might this Confirmation bias contrast with the results of the Asch conformity experiments? I believe people think they're pretty smart and not easily led when they're in the minority, as was refuted by Asch. So when they are presented with opposing information they become maybe overly stubborn. Has there been any discussion about this in the literature? If not, why the hell not?

Confirmation bias and Asch conformity experiments are both mentioned in many of the sources (Baron, Sutherland, Kunda) but in different chapters. Yes they are interesting for similar reasons, but one is a social pressure phenomenon and one is an internal effect in how someone internally handles information.

Bias blind spot (another article that's mostly my work) seems to be the phenomenon you're talking about above. Again, this is a related finding in the same area of psychology, but not the same thing.

The experiments mentioned in the early parts of the article introduce external factors such as research that participants were required to read, statements from political candidates, or stories about a theft. Research ostensibly comes from an expert. Politicians portray themselves (usually) as experts in law or policy. The story about the theft would come, I assume, from someone who has factual knowledge of the incident. While these experts weren't in the room staring at the participant such as in Asch, nonetheless, using information that comes from an expert has a bearing on how people come to their conclusions. The effect of people learning about the Asch experiments no doubt is that they will overcompensate for being too willing to follow the group (or random expert) and subsequently refuse to believe what the expert says, creating a bias.

I'm aware that if no sources make a connection between the two then you can't put one in the article. However, I thought it, and I was always the idiot in class who raised my hand and asked a question. Sometimes someone whispered "Thank God someone else asked that." I wasn't sure if you followed my connection here, so I felt I should explain it better. --Moni3 (talk) 17:08, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

This is a really interesting line of thought: maybe some of the confirmation bias effect can be understood in terms of obedience to authority or social conformity. Hand on heart, I don't find the social conformity (or compensation for it) in the sources on confirmation bias. MartinPoulter (talk) 18:02, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

Feel free to list me on your paper resulting from a massive research project when you devise experiments to connect the two. --Moni3 (talk) 19:39, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

• Husband E. Kimmel's confirmation bias played a role in the success of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in what way? What decision did Himmel make that led to greater loss of life and materiel?

Yes, this was vague. Now rephrased.

This is what it says now: US Admiral Husband E. Kimmel showed confirmation bias when playing down the first signs of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was an example of . --Moni3 (talk) 17:14, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

Ouch- I was rushing edits before I left my desk at the end of a working day. It is okay now?

• What is shotgunning? Is there no literature on conspiracy theories? Religious arguments?

Now you mention it, "shotgunning" is a technical term that the article could well do without.

In ordinary discussion (on blogs etc.) it's common to see people accusing each other of confirmation bias because they disagree about religion or whatever. In the scholarly sources on which this article is based, the examples are more abstract or more political such as gun control, hence the examples that the article concentrates on. The Nickerson material on pyramids comes close to conspiracy theory stuff. I think the reader can make their own connection with other conspiracy theories.

• In my own experience in being required to meet the NPOV policy by including observations and statements that I think are pretty stupid and have no merit in articles I construct, I notice that I react emotionally negative to reading this information. I guess this is the unpalatable part of what is described in the Explanations section. A natural connection to me at least, is discussing why people react so emotionally when faced with information that refutes a core belief. It's a physical sensation, like a gland just went nuts. I was hoping to read a discussion that connects how early ideas are formed about emotional beliefs like the death penalty and gun control, and how those ideas are maintained more by emotion than they are by reason, and how that effects brain chemistry when facing the opposing view. Of course, I didn't read the source material for the article. Was there anything about this issue in the sources?

Very nearly all the literature I've seen deals with confirmation bias as an abstract information processing effect. The most notable research that related it to brain processes is the Westen et al. MRI research mentioned in the article. This is pretty recent: it's one of the more recent references in the article. I expect more research like this will make it into textbooks and review papers in the coming years.

I wanted to have a discussion here about these issues before supporting and opposing. I like to choose one or the other in FAC. I think this article is well-written and very interesting. I like thought-provoking articles, and this one fit the bill. However, there are parts of the article where the language is so obtuse, or that it assumes the reader may already be familiar with psychological or statistical precepts that it's difficult to discern what the point of the sentence or paragraph is. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks. --Moni3 (talk) 14:40, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

Footnotes in lede

The lede should either have no footnotes, or else a lot more footnotes than it has now.Anythingyouwant (talk) 22:16, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

That's not necessarily the case. Leads don't have to cite what is cited and discussed lower in the article. If the lead covers something likely to be contested, such as statistics, quotes, or a fact that is controversial, it should be cited. --Moni3 (talk) 22:27, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

You're undermining my authority, Moni3. Seriously, in this case, the cited sentence is not controversial, and unlikely to be challenged. So, it should be easy to move the cite to the body of the article. Leaving it as-is will be a magnet attracting people to add more footnotes to the lead, IMO. BTW, maybe they should open a MOBS for pics like the Uriah Heep one (Museum of Bad Subjects).  :-)Anythingyouwant (talk) 22:40, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

The lead used to have fifteen footnotes. In the FAC, I was told that these break up the readability and, since the lead is a summary of the rest of the article, it shouldn't generally need its own references, except, as Moni3 says, for controversial statements. This sounds sensible to me. So to progress the article towards FA I cut out almost all the references. The remaining notes are necessary because 1) the phrase "myside bias" doesn't appear in the rest of the article, and it comes from one specific source, so we need to explain what that source is. 2) as the article explains, the meaning of the phrase "confirmation bias" has changed across time and across different sources, so we need to spell out at the outset which source the article uses for the definition in the first sentence. MartinPoulter (talk) 08:21, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

That's very reasonable, but there is an alternative way to do it. This is totally up to you, and I'm not going to implement it myself, but here's how I'd do it....In the first paragraph of the body (immediately under the heading "Types"), we could add after the first two words "or myside bias" and move the footnote from the lede. In that same paragraph (under the heading "Types") you write that some people use the term "confirmation bias" one way and some other people use it another way. You could add a sentence saying how the term is used in this Misplaced Pages article, and move the other footnote in the lede to the end of that paragraph. This might save you a lot of aggravation later when people see two footnotes in the lede and therefore start adding lots of "citation needed" tags to the rest of the lead.Anythingyouwant (talk) 15:11, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

Is the readability concern with regards to the presentation or the edit view? If the latter, you could consider using WP:LDR, at least for the lede.—RJH (talk) 17:17, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

It just seems that the article would be neater with the lede either fully footnoted or not footnoted at all. Having only one sentence footnoted will attract "citation needed" tags to the rest of the lede, and (as explained above) there doesn't seem to be any reason why the footnotes now in the lede couldn't be moved to the body of the article. This is not about having two different types of footnotes right next to each other in the lede (although I do think that looks odd too, and I've never seen such a thing in a scholarly article, even if it may be technically allowed here).Anythingyouwant (talk) 17:28, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

AYW, you and I are both used to editing articles that are very controversial and where users are likely to take content out of the lead if it isn't cited. This isn't the case with most of WP. Look through recent FAs, including today's Featured Article of the Day, Privilege of Peerage which has just two footnotes (to the same cite) in the lead. I'll consider your suggestions above. MartinPoulter (talk) 15:26, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Not to quibble or anything, but when Privilege of Peerage became a featured article on July 27,2004 there were no footnotes in the lead. When it passed featured article review on November 22,2007 the lead was fully footnoted (five footnotes). This is basically an issue of consistency in the lede; readers are less likely to be distracted (or subconsciously confused) if a pattern is used (no footnotes in the lead, everything footnoted in the lead, parentheticals after every listed item, no parentheticals after any listed item, naming the researchers for every study mentioned, naming the researchers for none of the studies mentioned, et cetera).Anythingyouwant (talk) 16:24, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the recent burst of copy editing, by the way! MartinPoulter (talk) 15:40, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

My pleasure, Martin. I haven't looked at your contributions, but I will now.  :-)Anythingyouwant (talk) 15:49, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Thank you. I haven't noticed a particular problem such as you describe in other featured articles (attracting "citation needed" tags because some references are included in the lede), but perhaps the situation is different because of the subject matter.—RJH (talk) 17:12, 27 June 2010 (UTC)

Confirmation bias and search engine design

Reading a thought-provoking review of Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, I was struck by this passage:

Concerns that the internet traps users in unchallenging information ghettos are not new, stretching back to 2001 and the US legal scholar Cass Sunstein’s book Republic.com. Sunstein argues that, when compared to older media, the internet allows users to seek out opinions and news with which they already agree, creating online news ghettos in which the views of right and left rarely mix.

What is surprising, however, is that today’s technology companies seem to use that book as a to-do-list. Google, for example, has been pushing to provide personalised search results to its users, meaning that two people searching for the same term may now get different results, altered according to what they have clicked on before. In December 2009, Google tweaked its rules in such a way that even users who are not signed into Google—thus denying the search giant access to their previous search history—will see their results personalised too.

I've seen this point raised before, but—with confirmation bias on my brain—it struck me in a new way. As regards users' preconceptions and hypotheses, we could describe the objective of this approach to search engine design as the creation of a feedback loop that reinforces confirmation bias. I wonder if there's been any serious consideration of the topic in these terms.—DCGeist (talk) 17:01, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

It's occasionally mentioned as an informal observation in this article's sources that people seek out sources that confirm what they already believe. The most prominent serious investigation of this that I've found is the Tabor and Lodge study mentioned under Confirmation_bias#Polarization_of_opinion which gave people the chance to access chunks of text from different sources on a computer screen.

As for the implications for search engines, they've not been mentioned in the sources I've looked at, but I agree it's worth keeping an eye out for a serious treatment. Facebook especially worries me with its eagerness to answer people's demands for reinforcement of their attitudes). I hope this article's increasing prominence will prompt many more thoughts along similar lines. MartinPoulter (talk) 18:16, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

There are frequently new articles right here on Misplaced Pages that are essentially POV forks from existing articles so that some editors can go on believing what they believed before they became Wikipedians. This is definitely an issue to watch out for, and sourced information on Internet information ghettos would be very helpful for this article. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk) 20:57, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Too few wikilinks or too many?

User:Piotrus asked for more wikilinks in the lede, citing WP:BTW. User:Dabomb87 has removed the resulting links as overlinking. I'm not sure myself whether we need terms like "bias", "belief" and "evidence" to be wikilinked. Can we build consensus here? MartinPoulter (talk) 12:04, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

BTW is not carte blanche to link any word that's somewhat "relevant" to the topic. It is true that words such as "belief", "evidence", "emotion", and "beliefs" are relevant, but the information in those articles does not at all aid the readers' understanding of confirmation bias. For example, click on belief. The first sentence is this: "Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true." Is that likely to be helpful? Most, if not all, readers could give you the basic essence of that definition if asked. There is no net benefit to linking these common terms, which dilute the higher-value links that readers should see. I left the link to "bias" because I thought there would be background information on biases that would help readers, but on clicking the link I saw it was just a glorified diambiguation page, so I delinked it. Dabomb87 (talk) 14:04, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for spelling that out. Seems reasonable to me, though I don't feel strongly either way. MartinPoulter (talk) 16:35, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

Proposed re-wording

In the "In scientific procedure" section, I think the sentence, "In the context of scientific research, confirmation biases can sustain theories or research programs in the face of inadequate or even contradictory evidence; the field of parapsychology has been particularly affected by confirmation bias in this way." would be better without the final clause, "by confirmation bias in this way". Since this wording was introduced in the FAC, I'd like to see if there's consensus for a change. MartinPoulter (talk) 12:13, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

• Support.—RJH (talk) 16:15, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

Hostile media effect

The statement recently added, that people may regard evidence that opposes their opinions as biased, is something I agree with and is a documented effect. I don't contest that the statement is true. I do question whether it should be mentioned in the lede of this article. There is a cluster of related biases, including confirmation bias, belief bias and the hostile media effect. The lede of this article isn't meant to introduce all of them, just the different kinds of confirmation bias and some effects that are described in sources as being directly related. It may well be my own biased recall, but I don't think the article's sources mention the hostile media effect directly in conjunction with confirmation bias, although clearly the same books will often mention both topics. I'm wary of packing descriptions of other biases into the lede, especially when those other biases are not mentioned in the article. MartinPoulter (talk) 11:54, 22 July 2010 (UTC) As a constructive suggestion, could Hostile media effect be added as a See also rather than put in the lede of this article? MartinPoulter (talk) 12:20, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

Unless someone comes along and can demonstrate that HME is described as a kind or effect of confirmation bias, that seems like a very reasonable way to deal with it.—DCGeist (talk) 18:35, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

I always knew Misplaced Pages was biased

I always knew Misplaced Pages was biased, and this article confirms it!μηδείς (talk) 02:59, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

How? Burpelson AFB (talk) 03:00, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

I believe he was making a joke :) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.140.42.98 (talk) 12:01, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

What about religion

If bias equates to preference, and that preference leads to omission of important information, then the glaring omission of the effect of confirmation bias on people's religious beliefs clearly makes this article biased, in the sense that it (perhaps deliberately) omits any discourse around faith.

Why are intellectual minds still shying away from discussing religious beliefs in the context of its inherent prejudice against scientific fact, and the significant role various biases and other cognitive filters play in building, internalising and reinforcing religious beliefs. Despite the mounting evidence against certain religious premises, such as the creation theory, which is probably one of the prime examples of confirmation bias in everyday (Western) culture, the topic fails to generate meaningful debate.

Surely the authors of both the article and the discussion must have considered the topic of religion when they decided to elaborate on finance, health, politics, science and even the paranormal (which is a very marginal brush with mainstream religion), yet they somehow decided to censor themselves from advancing the theme or even mentioning the word "religion".

One contributor said that he always believed that Misplaced Pages is biased (perhaps as a joke). Another asked "How?". This is how. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 165.146.110.12 (talk) 08:14, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

I agree, I was amazed that this article didn't mention the word "religion" even one time. Nortonew (talk) 21:05, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

Negation bias

Isn't there also a similar bias which works the other way? If so, what is it called?--78.144.102.48 (talk) 09:44, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

Praise!

What an interesting and thought provocing article! Very well written and excellent selection of sub topics. Well done! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.140.42.98 (talk) 12:46, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

Image for the article

It's too bad that there is no image in the lead. How about this image to lead off the article?: http://en.wikipedia.org/File:Bush_mission_accomplished.jpg Or, maybe just an image of a brain from commons? -- Ssilvers (talk) 14:21, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

The image currently used in the lead (making the point about gun ownership) is awful: it does nothing to illustrate the article's subject. As it is therefore completely unnecessary, and I cannot find where a consensus was reached that the picture is any good, I have been bold and removed it - I suggest until or unless a better one can be found that it remain that way. An example of a decent one might be a person reading a newspaper, as said newspaper may report its news biased towards that person's viewpoint (as the caption may explain). --92.25.213.145 (talk) 20:39, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

Subjective validation

I created the above stub a couple of years ago and haven't really visited it much since. I separated in out into an article when it was just a redirect to the Forer effect. My knowledge of cognitive biases was, and still is, pretty limited as were my sources at the time. Now I'm not sure one way or the other whether subjective validation deserves an article of its own or if it's better to be merged with (or redirected to) this article. What do others think? Big Bird (talk • contribs) 15:13, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

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