Confirmation Bias

This paper presents a critical analysis of two journal articles on the topic of “Confirmation Bias”. The first journal article selected for this particular assignment is titled as “Confirmation Politics and The Legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court: Institutional Loyalty, Positivity Bias, and the Alito Nomination”; written by James Gibson and Gregory A. Caldeira. This article was published in American Journal of Political Science in January issue of 2009.

The second article selected for this paper is titled as “Evaluating Scientific Research in the Context of Prior Belief: Hindsight Bias or Confirmation Bias”. This article is written by Amy M. Masnick and Corinne Zimmerman. This article was published in February issue of Journal of Psychology of Science & Technology in 2009.

Discussion

Both of the authors have stressed the need for further research in the field. According to the authors of the first article, “One explanation for why humans are susceptible to the confirmation bias is that it is an efficient way to process information. Humans are bombarded with information in the social world and cannot possibly take the time to carefully process each piece of information to form an unbiased conclusion. Human decision making and information processing is often biased because people are limited to interpreting information from their own viewpoint” (Masnick, Zimmerman, 29). People need to process information quickly to protect themselves from harm. It is adaptive to rely on instinctive, automatic reflexes that keep humans out of harm's way.

Another interesting finding is the concept of the hindsight bias, or the “I-knew-it-all-along” phenomenon. Social psychologists can demonstrate that people tend to exaggerate their ability to have foreseen how something turned out after learning the outcome. In other words, we overestimate our ability to predict how things turn out. Once we know the outcome, we find reasons for why it occurred that way and suggest that we knew it all along. For example, in several recent elections, the outcome was too close to call before the election. However, after the results became known, the political pundits, who only days before were unable to call the election, began to offer reasons for the way the results turned out and to express their wisdom on having earlier seen the signs of this eventuality. How often do we tend to do this same thing in our daily lives?

The authors of the second article hold the point of view that “people show the confirmation bias is to protect their self-esteem. People like to feel good about themselves, and discovering that a belief that they highly value is incorrect makes people feel bad about themselves. Therefore, people will seek information that supports their existing beliefs. Another motive is accuracy” (Gibson, Caldeira, 139). People want to feel that they are intelligent, and information that suggests one holds an inaccurate belief or made a poor decision suggests one is lacking intelligence.

Social psychologists show that attempts to attribute a reason for why something occurs can often be fraught with biases and errors. As human beings, we tend to make such ...