Expectations and other biases
Numerous psychological studies have found that we seek out information that supports our pre-existing views – and avoid information that might contradict them.
This cognitive bias can push people into more extreme ideological positions | BPS
And that’s the essence of confirmation bias, our most fundamental cognitive predisposition. When motivated to find a reason for a hunch, we tend to search for evidence to confirm it, and when we believe we’ve found that confirmation, we stop looking.
David McRaney • How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion
Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more likely you are to fall for stereotypes, because you’re faster at recognizing patterns. And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs.
Adam Grant • Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know
we need the biases, the emotional predispositions, to relieve that cognitive load. We just want them to be the right ones. As a wise man once said, one of the key tasks of critical reflection is to distinguish the true prejudices by which we understand from the false ones by which we misunderstand.
Alan Jacobs • How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds
That sort of error is called “statistical bias.” When your method of learning about the world is biased, learning more may not help. Acquiring more data can even consistently worsen a biased prediction.
Eliezer Yudkowsky • Rationality
The confirmation bias is the mother of all misconceptions. It is the tendency to interpret new information so that it becomes compatible with our existing theories, beliefs, and convictions.
Rolf Dobelli • The Art of Thinking Clearly
He categories different biases:
- Availability bias - the tendency to judge the likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant examples come to mind
- Confirmation bias - confirming what you expect to find by selectively accepting or ignoring information
- Affective bias - the tendency to make decisions based on what we wish were true
How doctors actually think
In psychology there are at least two biases that drive this pattern. One is confirmation bias:23 seeing what we expect to see. The other is desirability bias:24 seeing what we want to see. These biases don’t just prevent us from applying our intelligence. They can actually contort our intelligence into a weapon against the truth.