Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor and recall information in ways that confirm or support a person's prior beliefs, values or expectations, while giving disproportionately less consideration to information that contradicts them. It shows up in how people gather evidence, in how they interpret ambiguous evidence, and in what they remember afterward. The English psychologist Peter Wason's early experiments on hypothesis testing gave the effect its modern experimental grounding and its name, though the underlying tendency had been informally noted by philosophers and scientists long before it was named.
Facts
Core ClaimPeople systematically favor information that confirms what they already believe and discount or avoid information that would disconfirm it. 1 First Described Year Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Wason's hypothesis-testing experiments gave the bias its name and its first systematic study.
In Branch
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Confirmation Bias
Wikimedia FoundationDefinition and context sectionQuote, Definition and context section
a preference for information that is consistent with a hypothesis rather than information which opposes it.
1. Wikipedia: Confirmation Bias
Wikimedia FoundationHistory section
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