PS260 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Belief Perseverance, Confirmation Bias, Modus Ponens
Document Summary
Deduction is a process through which we start with general premises and then ask what follows from these premises. Imagine a rooster who believes that his crowing causes the sun to rise. This belief has a great deal of confirming evidence: every day the rooster crows, and then the sun rises. To test his hypothesis, the rooster needs to seek disconfirming evidence: one day he must not crow and see that the sun still rises. Confirmation bias is a tendency to be more responsive to evidence that confirms one"s beliefs and less responsive to evidence that challenges one"s beliefs. In a classic demonstration of confirmation bias, wason (1966) presented sequences like. Participants had to figure out a rule by generating other sequences and getting feedback from the experimenter regarding whether the sequence followed the rule. Participants tended only to generate sequences that confirmed their original beliefs about the rule and not generate sequences that could potentially disconfirm the rule.