Understanding Confirmation Bias in Decision-Making
Examine confirmation bias, its origins, and its influence on politics, investing, and various decision-making processes.
What is this page about?
An explainer of confirmation bias, the tendency to search for, interpret, and remember information that confirms existing beliefs, demonstrated by Wason's 2-4-6 task where people tested only sequences fitting their hypothesis. It distinguishes three types (biased search, interpretation, and memory), explains why the bias exists (cognitive efficiency and social argumentation arguments), shows it at work in politics, investing, science, and medicine plus digital amplification, and reviews debiasing strategies that work (consider the opposite, pre-mortems, red teams, falsificationist framing, prediction tracking) and their limits.
What has been corrected on this page?
Every accepted correction to this page is recorded with the exact change, so readers can see how the page improved over time.
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3 corrections applied: Bail et al. 2018 backfire study was published in PNAS, not American Sociological Review | Hart et al. selective-exposure meta-analysis was 2009 in Psychological Bulletin, matching the article's own reference list | Snyder & Uranowitz 'Betty' study was published in 1978, matching the article's own reference list
BeforeA 2016 study by Bail and colleagues, later published in the American Sociological Review; A 2011 meta-analysis by Hart and colleagues in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin; A 1981 study by Snyder and Uranowitz
AfterA 2016 study by Bail and colleagues, later published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2018); A 2009 meta-analysis by Hart and colleagues in Psychological Bulletin; A 1978 study by Snyder and Uranowitz
Why: Verified all 3 corrections already correctly present on the live site (body content and bibliography). None of the unverified variants appear in faq, excerpt, or meta_description. No further action needed.
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