Confirmation bias
Μεροληψία επιβεβαίωσης
Searching, checking and weighing in a way that favours the answer you already prefer, usually with no dishonesty anywhere in it: you check the inconvenient number three times and the convenient one not at all. Used on yourself it is a working tool. Used as a description of somebody else it is a charge they cannot answer and you cannot verify, and the conversation ends there.
How to spot it
Count the checks, not the conclusions. How many times did you go back to the number you did not like, and how many times to the one you did?
The research behind the term
The term is not our invention. It comes from published research, and what follows is what that research found — our own synthesis of the published abstract, not a translation of the original.
Stanovich, K. E. (2011). Rationality and the Reflective Mind — doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195341140.001.0001
What it found
- The book sets out to resolve the "Great Rationality Debate": how much irrationality we are entitled to attribute to human cognition.
- Combining dual-process theory with evolutionary psychology, it explains why people err despite possessing a highly adaptive cognitive apparatus.
- It proposes replacing dual models with tripartite ones: "System 2" has to be split into a reflective and an algorithmic mind.
- The reflective mind detects the need to interrupt automatic processing; the algorithmic mind sustains the simulation that follows.
How it found it
A monograph resting on an individual-differences approach: instead of asking whether the average person is rational, it examines where and why people differ from one another.
What it means for critical thinking
Having the computational capacity does not mean you will use it: critical thinking usually fails at the first step, at realizing that you need to stop and think.
Practised in
The term does not stay a definition. It appears inside missions where the pattern happens in real time and you have to recognise it as it happens to you.
Flawed Report
The Recommendation You Already Made
Sources
Every claim on this page maps to published research. The citations link to the original source.
- Stanovich, K. E. (2011). Rationality and the Reflective Mind — doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195341140.001.0001