Liberals are less likely to recall the many incorrect predictions over the decades, often strident and often from the left, that population growth would create widespread food shortages. If you’re politically liberal, maybe you’re thinking of the way that many conservatives ignore strong evidence of global warming and its consequences and instead glom onto weaker contrary evidence. Most of us can quickly come up with other forms of confirmation bias - and yet the examples we prefer tend to be, themselves, examples of confirmation bias. (He used the even simpler 2, 4 and 6, rather than our 2, 4 and 8.) ![]() This experiment is a version of one that the English psychologist Peter Cathcart Wason used in a seminal 1960 paper on confirmation bias. Not only are people more likely to believe information that fits their pre-existing beliefs, but they’re also more likely to go looking for such information. This disappointment is a version of what psychologists and economists call confirmation bias. It’s a lot more pleasant to hear “yes.” That, in a nutshell, is why so many people struggle with this problem. A mere 7 percent heard at least three nos - even though there is no penalty or cost for being told no, save the small disappointment that every human being feels when hearing “no.” Remarkably, 80 percent of people who have played this game so far have guessed the answer without first hearing a single no. They don’t want to hear the answer “no.” In fact, it may not occur to them to ask a question that may yield a no. And then they make a classic psychological mistake. ![]() They come up with a theory for what the answer is, like: Each number is double the previous number. Children in kindergarten can understand this rule.īut most people start off with the incorrect assumption that if we’re asking them to solve a problem, it must be a somewhat tricky problem. The rule was simply: Each number must be larger than the one before it.
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