Confirmation bias, as the term is typically used in the psychological literature, connotes the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a h...

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Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises:

The logic of social exchange: has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason selection task.

Strategies for hypothesis testing in scientific investigation and everyday reasoning have interested both psychologists and philosophers. A number of these scholars stress the importance of disconfir. marion in reasoning and suggest that people are instead prone to a general deleterious "confirmation bias" In particula~ it is suggested that people tend to test those cases that have the best chance of verifying current beliefs rather than those that have the best chance of falsifying them. We show, howeve~ that many phenomena labeled "confirmation bias" are better understood in terms of a general positive test strate~. With this strategy, there is a tendency to test cases that are expected (or known) to have the property of interest rather than those expected (or known) to lack that property. This strategy is not equivalent to confirmation bias in the first sense; we show that the positive test strategy can be a very good heuristic for determining the truth or falsity of a hypothesis under realistic conditions~ It can, howeve~ lead to systematic errors or inefficiencies. The appropriateness of human hypotheses-testing strategies and prescriptions about optimal strategies must he understood in terms of the interaction between the strategy and the task at hand.

/pdf/confirmation-disconfirmation-and-information-in-hypothesis-8ag5boxfnh.pdf

Confirmation, Disconfirmation, and Information in Hypothesis Testing

Pragmatic reasoning schemas

(2008). Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? Arts Education Policy Review: Vol. 109, No. 4, pp. 21-32.

Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?

Prior studies have indicated that thematic materials facilitate reasoning on the four-card selection problem, a task that assesses ability to evaluate logical conditionals of the “if-then” form. Recently, however, attempts to replicate the thematic effect have failed. The present study investigated four content materials to determine which facilitated reasoning. Introductory psychology students were required to determine which card(s) needed to be “unmasked” in order to determine the truth or falsity of conditional rules. Thematic materials did not facilitate reasoning compared with abstract materials. Evidence for both matching and verification bias was obtained, but neither was sufficient to account for all selection patterns. Subjects may thus be using “cognitive short-circuiting” strategies, of which matching bias and verification bias are but two examples.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758%2FBF03330048.pdf

The effect of thematic content on cognitive strategies in the four-card selection task

Recent studies by Mahoney and Kimper, and by Kern, Mirels and Hinshaw, suggest that scientists do very poorly on a standard psychological task involving inferences about `If... then...' conditionals. More recently, Yachanin found that the nature of the task instructions greatly affected performance on such tasks. In the present study, results obtained from twenty research scientists using Yachanin's modified task are reported. Scientists performed at a very high level, in contrast to non-scientist subjects, displaying understanding of the power of disconfirmatory data in assessing conditionals, and of the possible error of affirming the consequent when only confirmatory data are sought. The results disconfirm the earlier claim that scientists are no more able to use such heuristics than are undergraduates.

Stephen A. Yachanin

Papers

The effect of thematic content on cognitive strategies in the four-card selection task

Can Scientists Rationally Assess Conditional Inferences