Confirmation Bias

Extracted Attributes

• Nature

  Psychological tendency, cognitive bias, error in thinking

• Explanations

  Wishful thinking, limited human capacity to process information, pragmatic assessment of costs of being wrong

• Also known as

  Confirmatory bias, myside bias, congeniality bias

• Core mechanism

  Seeking, interpreting, favoring, and recalling information that reinforces pre-existing beliefs or values

• Impacted domains

  Political, organizational, financial, scientific contexts, investigative processes, medical diagnoses

• Specific effects

  Attitude polarization, belief perseverance, irrational primacy effect, illusory correlation

• Conditions for strongest effect

  Desired outcomes, emotionally charged issues, deeply entrenched beliefs

• Amplifying factors (social media)

  Filter bubbles, algorithmic editing

Timeline

• Series of psychological experiments suggested people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs. (Source: Wikipedia)

  1960s

• Later psychological work re-interpreted initial findings as a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, ignoring alternatives. (Source: Wikipedia)

  Post-1960s

Confirmation bias

Confirmation bias (also confirmatory bias, myside bias, or congeniality bias) is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Biased search for information, biased interpretation of this information, and biased memory recall have been invoked to explain four specific effects: attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence) belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false) the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations). A series of psychological experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs. Later work re-interpreted these results as a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Another proposal is that people show confirmation bias because they are pragmatically assessing the costs of being wrong rather than investigating in a neutral, scientific way. Flawed decisions due to confirmation bias have been found in a wide range of political, organizational, financial, and scientific contexts. These biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. For example, confirmation bias produces systematic errors in scientific research based on inductive reasoning (the gradual accumulation of supportive evidence). Similarly, a police detective may identify a suspect early in an investigation, but then may only seek confirming rather than disconfirming evidence. A medical practitioner may prematurely focus on a particular disorder early in a diagnostic session, and then seek only confirming evidence. In social media, confirmation bias is amplified by the use of filter bubbles and "algorithmic editing", which display to individuals only information they are likely to agree with, while excluding opposing views.

Web Search Results

• Confirmation Bias - Ethics Unwrapped

  Confirmation bias is the tendency of people’s minds to seek out information that supports the views they already hold. It also leads people to interpret evidence in ways that support their pre-existing beliefs, expectations, or hypotheses. [...] Skip to main content English Español (Spanish) English Español (Spanish) Ethics Defined # Confirmation Bias Confirmation bias is our tendency to seek out or interpret information that supports our pre-existing beliefs, expectations, or hypotheses. Back to Series ## Confirmation Bias

• CONFIRMATION BIAS definition | Cambridge English Dictionary

  Doctors may fallprey to confirmationbias, which leads them to misconstrue the evidence before them. Confirmation bias is a tendency for people to favorinformation that confirmstheirpreconceptions or hypothesisregardless of whether the information is true. When it comes to making investmentdecisions, peopleassume the future will be the same as the past, and they also have a "confirmationbias," only looking at the evidence that confirmstheirbeliefs.

• Confirmation bias - Wikipedia

  Confirmation biases are effects in information processing. They differ from what is sometimes called the behavioral confirmation effect, commonly known as self-fulfilling prophecy, in which a person's expectations influence their own behavior, bringing about the expected result. [...] ## Definition and context [edit] Confirmation bias, previously used as a "catch-all phrase", was refined by English psychologist Peter Wason, as "a preference for information that is consistent with a hypothesis rather than information which opposes it." [...] Some psychologists restrict the term "confirmation bias" to selective collection of evidence that supports what one already believes while ignoring or rejecting evidence that supports a different conclusion. Others apply the term more broadly to the tendency to preserve one's existing beliefs when searching for evidence, interpreting it, or recalling it from memory. Confirmation bias is a result of automatic, unintentional strategies rather than deliberate deception. ## Types [edit]

• What Is Confirmation Bias? | Definition & Examples - Scribbr

  Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias, or an error in thinking. Processing all the facts available to us costs us time and energy, so our brains tend to pick the information that agrees most with our preexisting opinions and knowledge. This leads to faster decision-making. Mental “shortcuts” like this are called heuristics. When confronted with new information that confirms what we already believe, we are more likely to: [...] Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out and prefer information that supports our preexisting beliefs. As a result, we tend to ignore any information that contradicts those beliefs. Confirmation bias is often unintentional but can still lead to poor decision-making in (psychology) research and in legal or real-life contexts. ## Table of contents [...] What’s the difference between confirmation bias and recall bias? : Confirmation bias is the tendency to search, interpret, and recall information in a way that aligns with our pre-existing values, opinions, or beliefs. It refers to the ability to recollect information best when it amplifies what we already believe. Relatedly, we tend to forget information that contradicts our opinions.

• 17 Confirmation Bias Examples (2025) - Helpful Professor

  Confirmation bias is a very self-serving type of bias. It can take many shapes and effect our thinking processes across a wide range of contexts. Sometimes it clouds our perceptions of not-so-significant events such as the outcome of a game or the effectiveness of essential oils. [...] The key difference is that belief bias focuses on _making judgments about validity of logic_ based on our expected conclusions; whereas confirmation bias is about _making judgments about the conclusion_ to suit or desires. Often, when engaging in confirmation bias, we may employ belief bias as a way to support our desired conclusion. _See Also: A Full List of The Different Types of Bias_ Conclusion [...] Confirmation bias refers to the seek out information that supports our desired conclusions. Belief bias refers to the tendency to make judgments about the validity of an argument based on the believability of its conclusions. It often leads us to believe an argument that is illogical simply because it got us to the conclusion we desire.

• Instance Of

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