Confirmation Bias & Belief Perserverance

2. Confirmation Bias & Belief Perseverance

These illusions and the overconfidence are bred by Confirmation Bias. People prone to seek and heed to the information as the reasons which support their preconceptions. The similarities of the information would be paid attention to by selective facilitation with the effect of anchor. The more consistent information with the preconceptions they retrieve, the greater the confidence over the selected answer.

Every individual including experts or highly-educated people would make decision under the influence of Confirmation Bias unintentionally. A survey conducted by Moss and Butler (1978) reveals that academic psychologists with plenty of prior beliefs of extrasensory perception (ESP) tend to be skeptical in information analysis and evidence searching towards the paranormal phenomenon. This automatic cognitive processing hinders every single person, either due to too much or too little cues, from incorporating objective facts and considering alternative ideas.

Belief Perseverance, meanwhile, could co-exists with the operation of Confirmation Bias. As mentioned above, the latter works as selective choosing of evidences while the former leads people to ignore the less aligning or contradictory ones. Belief Perseverance is people tend to maintain their initial biased belief even after receiving the new empirical evidence for avoiding dissonance, especially in an initial ambiguous situation. Failure of assimilation results people in refusing to absorb new information and disconfirming the discredited evidence with Conjunction Fallacy (Error of between-subjects comparisons).

In an equivocal situation, Belief Perseverance sustains when soliciting information is easy and narrow. The study of Davies (1997) indicates the subject group’s biased belief with fewer pre-stated outcomes likely survives. Another study of Anderson (1983) demonstrates initial belief of the subject group remains intact by being asked to explain with the aligning reasons. Objective decision-making could be attributed to the false casualties by recollecting and reconfirming available data.

On the whole, bias are inevitable due to Availability Heuristics which is first assessed, but if not available, Representative Heuristics is applied with highly specific outcomes and more diagnostic reasons.