PHL 131 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Lake Wobegon, Confirmation Bias
8 Jun 2020
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Document Summary
Confirmation bias: when if you believe something, then you are likely to treat neutral evidence as a confirmation of your belief. Disconfirmation bias: when biases overstate the evidence against a hypothesis. Sometimes, in a structurally biased situation, already believing p may lead us not only to ignore evidence suggesting that not p, but also to stop looking for evidence once we have data supporting our prior belief. Attribution theory: an approach to studying how people ascribe psychological states and explain behavior, including their own. Self-serving bias: when emotions, desired and personality combine toward one explanation over another. Ex: would rather consider myself as working than lazy. Lake wobegon effect/optimistic self-assessment: we tend to rank ourselves as above average with respect to certain virtues. Continued influence effect: a term denoting the way that information continues to influence our judgments even after we know enough to conclude that it was actually misinformation.
