People tend to approach agreeable propositions with a bias toward confirmation and disagreeable propositions with a bias toward disconfirmation. Because the appropriate strategy for solving the four-card Wason selection task is to seek disconfirmation, the authors predicted that people motivated to reject a task rule should be more likely to solve the task than those without such motivation. In two studies, participants who considered a Wason task rule that implied their own early death (Study 1) or the validity of a threatening stereotype (Study 2) vastly outperformed participants who considered nonthreatening or agreeable rules. Discussion focuses on how a skeptical mindset may help people avoid confirmation bias both in the context of the Wason task and in everyday reasoning.
A number of investigators have claimed that subjects show confirmation bias on a variety of reasoning tasks. However, subjects who were classified as “confirming” had often sele...
Strategies for hypothesis testing in scientific investigation and everyday reasoning have interested both psychologists and philosophers.A number of these scholars stress the im...
We propose a model of motivated skepticism that helps explain when and why citizens are biased‐information processors. Two experimental studies explore how citizens evaluate arg...
It is proposed that motivation may affect reasoning through reliance on a biased set of cognitive processes--that is, strategies for accessing, constructing, and evaluating beli...
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, ...
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