Anti-environmentalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-environmentalism 

Anti-environmentalism is a set of ideas and actions that oppose environmentalism as a whole or specific environmental policies or environmental initiatives. Criticism of environmentalism originates from multiple ideologies, interest groups, and political objectives. Oppositions can take the form of an organized countermovement, aimed at scientific claims about climate change, environmental policies and regulations, in both national or international spheres. Anti-environmentalist actors may include workers in industries and companies that are threatened by environmental policies, and anti-environmentalist think tanks.

The reasons for opposition vary. They range from economic interests to ideological and political positions that are hostile towards environmental social and political change, including critical perspectives that encourage environmentalists to think about more inclusive approaches toward sustainability.

History

Criticism of environmentalism has taken different forms in different historical periods. Many oppositions to environmentalism have arisen within the environmental movement itself, from the internal contrasts and debates.

During the 1960s and 1970s, environmentalism was inspired by concerns about resource scarcity and over-exploitation: fear of the future well-being of humanity in relation to the planets health. This concept is known as neo-Malthusianism. These ideas came under criticism from neoclassical economists, who felt that the role of scientific and technological innovation in securing additional resources was overlooked. Some challenged the reliability of mathematical models, including that of the famous Club of Rome's Limits to Growth Report: critics argued that it had not adequately considered feedback and the effects of human decisions. Criticism also came from the left, for example from thinkers such as Murray Bookchin, who attributed environmental problems to political and social causes rather than natural resource scarcity. Marxist critics argued that environmentalist ideas, influenced by neo-Malthusianism, had racist, elitist, and imperialist overtones, and considered them reactionary.

Meanwhile, business interests affected by the rapidly expanding environmental legislations formed alliances to counter it. These coalitions reflected the same methods of social and environmental movements: community-level mobilization and collaborative partnerships, as well as public awareness campaigns, media engagement, research publications, and providing testimony during hearings.

During the 1980s, environmentalism gained traction as a social and political force in many Western countries. National environmental legislation and international environmental initiatives grew in response to scientific findings. Oppositions arose against perceived excesses among environmentalist positions (e.g., against apocalyptic visions of the future). Radical and organized oppositions also arose in the form of countermovements.

The 1990s witnessed the full emergence of public relations applied to environmental issues. The corporation-led coalition-building efforts from the 1970s continued to expand. Some corporations even went beyond their corporate allies by hiring specialized PR firms to establish front groups, creating the illusion of grassroots support for corporate interests to persuade politicians to oppose environmental reforms. Environmental public relations, often referred to as greenwashing, has become a lucrative industry for PR firms. Tactics that were enacted to defend Tobacco companies by minimizing or denying health effects are applied today by the fossil fuel industry; in some instances employing the same actors. American companies now invest hundreds of millions of dollars annually in greenwashing and strategic counsel, which involves shaping public and governmental perceptions of environmental problems and devising strategies to counter environmentalists and regulations. Misinformation around climate change is spread via think tanks, political actors, influencers, conservative media creating information echo chambers.

The United States, which since the 1970s had first developed models of environmental legislation later imitated around the world, has repeatedly seen the rise of pressure and initiatives to reduce environmental legislation among Republican politicians and administrations. For example, President George W. Bush stated in his campaign platform that he would "ensure that the federal government, which is the country's largest polluter, complies with all environmental laws" and that the United States would even exceed the set standards. Though once elected, Bush verged from what he had promised during his campaign, and instead reversed the initiatives of the previous Clinton administration on drinking water, and advocated for oil exploration in protected regions. Bush's administration also moved forward in withdrawing its support of the Kyoto Protocol, a worldwide global warming agreement created in 1997. Bush stated that he would work with allies to the United States to reduce greenhouse gases, but would not carry out a plan that would "harm the economy" and "hurt American workers". The conflict between support and opposition to environmental policies has become an important factor in the growing social and political polarization in the United States.

Anti-environmentalist movements and ideologies

Anti-environmentalism is fueled by both social and economic reasons and ideological positions. The ideological underpinnings of anti-environmentalism can be very diverse and sometimes opposed to each other: from neoliberal to anti-capitalist ideologies.

In some contexts, especially in the United States, anti-environmentalist social movements and initiatives are frequently inspired by conservative or neoliberal political ideologies: these favor a free market economy over government regulation. Such political positions find support in corporate interests that feel threatened by environmental concerns or environmental regulations. Although many observers of anti-environmentalism point out the frequent association between these initiatives and specific business interests threatened by environmental policies, others consider that there are cultural factors in certain social groups that underlie their anti-environmentalism.

For example, a study of the American right has suggested that many of the anti-environmentalist positions are rooted in its traditional distrust, widespread within the right-wing electorate, of government intervention, its support for the free market as a symbol of the American dream, and its defense of Christian values, family, white identity and traditional masculinity. This resistance is fueled by concern about political and cultural changes resulting from the social movements of the 1960s out of which environmentalism emerged. Some anti-environmentalist positions may arise from genuine anxiety related to the consequences of environmental regulations feared for the economic well-being of families and communities. Opposition to environmentalists may also be widespread among social sectors that see environmentalists as linked to urban life, alienated from local realities and knowledge, and closer to specialized knowledge.

Many experts argue that ideological explanations of anti-environmentalism, based on traditional concepts of the political left and right, are of little use in interpreting current political positions, especially regarding climate policies. Research in the social and political fields suggests that populist and nationalist ideologies are more relevant factors.

In Europe, anti-environmentalism is widespread in the radical right and is generally associated with typical opposition to immigration, nationalism, welfare chauvinism (i.e., social policies must favor the country's citizens), and euroscepticism. The anti-environmentalism of the radical right can be understood as a materialist reaction against the post-materialism of the left and the greens, i.e., that ideology that elevates the need for political freedom and participation, self-actualization, personal relationships, creativity, and care for the environment over the satisfaction of material needs.

The reasons behind the prevalent anti-environmentalism expressed by right-wing populists in Europe and North America are subject to debate and remain intricate. On one hand, economic and social factors play a role: a significant portion of these parties' supporters comprises individuals who have felt the economic impacts of globalization and modernization, viewing climate policies as linked to their struggles and exacerbating their situation. On the other hand, ideological considerations come into play and can be categorized in two ways. Firstly, there is a disdain for climate policies perceived as initiatives championed by liberal, globally oriented individuals who are seen as not prioritizing the nation's interests. Secondly, there is a preference for a direct connection between ordinary citizens and those in positions of power. The complexity of climate change, demanding intricate solutions, contrasts with their inclination toward simplicity. Additionally, there is a belief that figures in authority, including climate scientists and environmentalists, are influenced by special interests, fostering skepticism toward climate initiatives.

Actors supporting anti-environmentalism

Opposition to environmentalism is often supported by corporations and coordinated through conservative think tanks, alongside sham public support campaigns (known as astroturfing) orchestrated by public relations firms. These actors create links between corporate interests, conservative intellectuals, and segments of the public who share conservative perspectives or are concerned about the impact of environmental policies on communities and workers in specific sectors.

Conservative think tanks or sometimes academic researchers participate in the development of anti-environmentalist analysis and policy positions. Among the intellectuals and authors who have distinguished themselves internationally are Danish academic Bjørn Lomborg, Canadian former Greenpeace activist Patrick Moore, Canadian journalist Rex Murphy, and the US commentator Vivian Krause.

Public relations firms regularly assist the communication and lobbying of large companies whose interests are affected by environmental policies. Some communications initiatives may support the establishment of social front groups capable of lobbying legislators to reduce environmental regulations. Conservative foundations and philanthropic entities that fund anti-environmental initiatives are also active in the United States.

Some of these institutional actors (e.g., Citizens for a Sound Economy, founded by entrepreneur David Koch) call themselves environmentalists and argue that traditional environmental groups have overstated environmental problems. They use green marketing techniques to convince the public of their high level of environmental responsibility. In essence, these organizations create controversial information and call it environmental or green ideology. They frequently endorse campaigns to increase access to certain resources, such as forests and mines.

Think tanks associated with companies and seemingly independent groups can present themselves as autonomous research centers capable of providing expertise (analysis and communication) valued by the mass media. The media gives them space to balance environmentalist perspectives. However, this process can lead the media to overemphasize scientific uncertainty on some environmental issues. In other words, by presenting such sources as independent and reliable, the media may unintentionally amplify the perception of uncertainty, influencing public perceptions of specific environmental issues.

Additional strategies used by corporations or support actors like PR firms and think tanks may also include: co-opting moderate environmentalists through donations, job offers, and deals, while marginalizing and alienating non-cooperative individuals, often labeling them as extremists; dirty tricks campaigns to falsely implicate environmentalists in violent actions; threat of Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) (in the United States) to intimidate environmentalists and citizens who engage in activities such as petitioning, writing to officials, attending public meetings, organizing boycotts, or participating in peaceful demonstrations, aiming to silence critics through legal pressure.

Other conservative think tanks (e.g., Cato Institute and The Heritage Foundation) address environmental issues as part of a broader agenda, including discussions of fiscal policy, energy, monetary policy, education, health care, and global economic liberalism. They consider that many public interest or environmental regulations are counterproductive. They support judicial activism to protect civil and economic liberties, an open and competitive energy market, and the importance of consumer choice and private incentives over a public approach to address real environmental concerns.

Many conservative think tanks involved in climate change, mineral resources, and indigenous rights issues are connected to the Atlas Network. Since the 1980s, the Atlas Network has been a supporter of neoliberal ideas, promoting these through international networking and funding of conservative think tanks. The organization operates globally, encompassing hundreds of think tanks across all continents.

Notable cases

Climate change skeptics

The most widespread contemporary example of organized anti-environmentalism is the climate change denial or skepticism movement. Skeptics attack the evidence for climate change. Skepticism can target the observed trend ("global warming does not exist"), the identification of causes ("warming exists, but humans are not responsible"), or the impact ("warming could be harmless or even beneficial"). This kind of skepticism is intended to fuel uncertainty about climate science: the goal is to undermine scientific discourses of environmental policy or to confuse the public and policymakers.

Another type of skepticism is so-called response skepticism, that is, skepticism directed at actions taken to address climate change. It can be associated with climate denialism, but can also be expressed without opposing the evidence of climate change ("climate change exists and is caused by humans, but the prevailing responses are wrong or overly harmful").

Climate skepticism is widespread among European parties of the far right and radical right. However, a study of the positions expressed by these parties in the European Parliament indicated that they rarely manifest climate denialism: opposition is more often directed at climate policies. Anti-environmentalist positions are intended to fuel a pro-sovereignist and anti-elite desire and speak to issues close to voters, such as economic welfare. They also include pro-environmental and pro-climate positions and support for the fight against climate change. They are accompanied by a critique of liberal climate policies as causing pollution, and of global capitalism and in favor of localism and economic nationalism.

The climate skeptic movement is supported by certain corporate or national interests that wish to maintain the profitability of economic sectors (especially those related to fossil fuels) in the face of growing environmental concerns. It also draws on anxieties about environmental protection among segments of the public that rely on fossil fuel-intensive economies. The countermovement is supported by a minority of scientists who have been visible promoters of climate science skepticism and by an extensive network of think tanks, which often also pursue other neoliberal or conservative agendas (e.g., against government regulation).

Libertarian movements in the United States

In the 1980s, the so-called "wise use" movement emerged, consisting of local groups mainly in the western part of North America. This movement emerged as a diverse alliance of ranchers, miners, loggers, hunters, off-road vehicle drivers, oil workers, and farmers who, despite their differences, united against environmentalists. They oppose public environmental management initiatives, which are perceived as authoritarian and detrimental to individual freedoms. They share the belief that a limited, non-interventionist government is more just, believing that a large bureaucracy threatens individual rights and freedoms. They support the individual right to use natural resources as part of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Their proposals include logging in national forests, revising the Endangered Species Act to eliminate protection of "non-adaptive" species such as the California condor, immediate oil extraction in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and opening all public lands, including national parks and wilderness areas, to mineral and energy production. They also support the development of national parks run by private companies and civil penalties for anyone who legally challenges economic activity or development on federal lands. Some members have also supported violent actions.

Internal criticism

External criticisms of environmentalism often arise from or are related to internal disputes between different currents within the movement. Over the past two decades, the environmental movement has undergone significant changes and has not only faced external criticisms but also internal challenges with the emergence of environmental justice movements, civil environmental movements, and those focused on sustainable development choices and the transformation of production and technological systems. In particular, the tension between deep or ecosystem-centered ecology (accused of anti-humanism by external opponents) and humanist or social justice-oriented environmentalists has generated new perspectives that are more attentive to the social aspects of environmental choices. The environmental justice perspective deals with the disproportionate and unjust distribution of environmental risks and harms within and among societies.

In recent years, environmental social sciences, such as environmental history, political ecology, and environmental sociology, have been growing in importance. These disciplines have contributed to a deepening understanding of the complex link between the environment and society. This progress has overcome the simplified views that often underlie anti-environmentalist positions, paving the way for new perspectives and more sophisticated approaches.The new knowledge has had a significant impact on the formulation of alternative concepts of sustainability and the practice of more conscious environmental policies.

One example of this tension relates to the application of nature conservation models inspired by North American ideals of wilderness conservation. The use of such models in different contexts has caused conflicts with local traditions of land use. This tension and the criticism of traditional conservation models have often led to an evolution of the models themselves, seeking to better integrate pre-existing relationships between local people and their land. In general, in developing countries, local environmentalist ideas and actions are not necessarily influenced by the post-materialist perspectives of Western environmentalism. For communities in these countries, environmental challenges are often linked to struggles over natural resources, as in the case of disputes between farmers and companies over timber or between rural and urban residents over water and energy. Such conflicts often focus on the environment, as poorer communities seek to preserve control over their natural resources to prevent them from being lost to increasing state control or the expanding market system.

As a result of these debates and criticisms, environmentalism is changing the way it deals with environmental science and the management of environmental problems, moving away from intransigent principled positions and accepting the complexity of the issues. This shift recognizes the uncertainties in establishing cause-and-effect relationships, especially when dealing with large-scale environmental problems. In addition, there is an increasing emphasis on understanding power dynamics, winners and losers in environmental change and legislation. Although some changes are taking place, traditional ways of thinking, such as neo-Malthusian, romantic, and catastrophist perspectives, persist in the environmental movement.

Examples of national and local conflicts

Alberta oil sands in Canada

The Alberta oil sands has also been a point of contention between environmentalists and those who exclusively consider economic growth to be important. Anti-environmentalists maintain that the oil sands have improved Canada's relations with the United States as Canada is their number one foreign supplier of oil.

As well, the oil sands have brought a secure source of energy to Canada, as well as tremendous economic gains for Alberta. There are environmental efforts in place to mitigate the effects that the mining involved in operating the oil sands mine has on animal species, though some environmentalist groups are not satisfied. Environmentalist groups such as Greenpeace are concerned with the environmental, social and health impacts of mining the oil sands, particularly on First Nations communities in Alberta.

Standing Rock in the United States

See also: Dakota Access Pipeline protests

The source of this conflict is that on January 25, 2016, Dakota Access announced that it received permit approval to move forward with the construction of a four-state crude oil pipeline which would transport 470,000 barrels of oil per day from North Dakota to Illinois. Anti-environmentalists defended the construction of the Pipeline as it would create thousands of jobs, make the United States more energy independent and create a more cost-effective method of transporting oil to major refining markets. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe took issue with this as the pipeline would run through their communities, tainting their sacred land as well as contaminating their water supply. What followed in the next ten months was a response from Sioux communities, protestors and environmentalist groups in the form of peaceful protests in which over 400 arrests were made by local law enforcement. Environmentalist groups responded to the event with an open letter condemning the actions of the North American banks who helped fund the pipeline, and encouraged them to stop any future payments contributing to it.

The Czech Republic and the Highway by-pass project

In 1991, Plzeň, Czech Republic experienced immense air pollution that citizens felt was the source of their health problems. The government decided they needed to build a new highway so the traffic could no longer create pollution in the city. Two different plans were created, one being the K variant which put the highway south of the city, and the S variant which would go through protected land, and would have negative impacts on rural areas as opposed to the city. This event began environmental movements in the Czech Republic that protested the S variant. In previous years, Czechoslovakia had been focused on the Soviet model of industrial expansion which lacked environmental regulation. This had effects on the environment, such as low-grade coal used in houses and by industries as well as lead gasoline used in automobiles. In the 1980's environmental activists protested the governments lack of environmental regulation. Political campaigns thereafter became increasingly anti-environmental through media outlets and newspaper coverage. Media coverage shared statements such as "Environmentalists believe that bugs are more important than people" and "Beware of environmentalists – they are extremists." These statements created fear of environmental causes in the population.

Situation in some countries

Canada

Stephen Harper: Stephen Harper criticized Canada's prior environmental policy for having high restrictions on industry, as Harper sought to industrialize. He wanted to ensure that industries could have better access to natural resources with the goal of increasing Canada's Economy. In May 2011, Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada won the Canadian federal election with a majority government, which allowed them to make significant changes to Canada's environmental policy. A bill passed May 2012 titled the "Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act." The Harper government focused more economic growth, such as the oil industry in Alberta. Northern Alberta has oil in their tar sands and extracting it was seen by environmentalists as destruction to the environment and a source of Greenhouse gas emissions. The Harper government focused on expanding the economy over the interests of environmentalists. Also environmental groups were also deemed "extremists" by the Harper Government and listed them under the anti-terrorism strategy as a national security threat.

In 2014, Environment Canada released its annual emissions trends report, which showed that Canada was not going to meet emission reduction targets as was promised in 2009. In fact, Canada is on track to increase its emissions up until 2020. Harper's government, while committed to reducing emissions over the long term, disapproved of limiting oil and gas emissions as the price of oil rose higher.

This was consistent with Harper's decision to withdraw Canada from the Kyoto Protocol in 2011. The main reason given for this by Harper was that Canada was not having success in meeting the protocol's targets. In the following years, Harper's administration made it difficult for foreign-based environmental groups to obstruct Canadian economic growth. Environmental charities experienced frequent audits by the federal government which resulted in less productivity and being at risk of losing their charitable status. Harper also repealed a significant environmental policy which had previously been in place; the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. Later, a new version of the act was created. In 2015, with the election of Justin Trudeau, the environment became one of Canada's main concerns, with Trudeau eventually signing the Paris Agreement in 2016, and has been aggressive at curtailing the oil and gas industry.

United States

Former President Barack Obama promised to make the United States more environmentally conscious, and implemented the Clean Power Plan, invested significantly in clean energy, and improved standards for fuel economy of vehicles; this reduced pollution and was also economical. Obama also made a joint agreement with China to reduce the emissions of both countries, and to reduce emissions in the United States by 27% by 2025. The state of environmental affairs in the United States changed drastically under the Donald Trump administration. Trump had been open about his plans to alter or withdraw entirely from many climate change and environmental agreements the United States was then involved in, such as the Paris Agreement. As this agreement is voluntary, the United States faced no penalty for declining to participate. However, as the United States is the second largest emitter of carbon after China, their lack of participation in the agreement would greatly impact global efforts to reduce carbon emissions. While in 1999, President Bill Clinton announced that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would enforce the toughest standards to date, Trump's administration instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website. EPA employees stated at the time that if the page were to be taken down, years of research on global warming would be gone, as well as detailed data on emissions and links to scientific global warming research. On June 1, 2017, Trump announced that the U.S. would cease all participation in the Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation. Trump stated that "The Paris accord will undermine (the U.S.) economy," and "puts (the U.S.) at a permanent disadvantage."

China

In China, the city of Maoming became the focus of an environmental dispute in 2014, relating to the municipal government-sponsored Para-Xylene (PX) industry - a chemical used in manufacturing plastics, such as those in water bottles and polyesters. The industry has been promoted in Maoming for its economic benefits due to the jobs provided by the factories. Despite the industry's economic benefits, citizens organized PX protest in 2014 as there was increasing concern for the chemical's environmental and health risks to the citizens of the city. To counteract the environmentalist social movement, the government took action by creating an agreement that all civilians must sign stating they will not engage in protests or speak of the industry negatively, which high school students had to sign in order to graduate, as well as implementing an education campaign by providing lectures to the citizens on PX project.

France

In June 2023, Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin announced that the French government would be forcibly dissolving the Les Soulèvements de la Terre. The announcement came following a series of raids by anti-terrorist police against the group, resulting in 18 arrests.

Human Rights Watch stated that the dissolution was "wholly disproportionate" and was part of "a growing trend of stigmatization and criminalization of individuals and civil society organizations raising awareness about the consequences of climate change" in France under Emmanuel Macron.

Denialism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism

Anti-denialist banner at the 2017 Climate March in Washington, D.C.

In the sciences and in historiography, denialism is the rejection of basic facts and concepts that are undisputed, well-supported parts of the scientific consensus or historical record on a subject, in favor of ideas that are radical, controversial, or fabricated. Examples include Holocaust denial, AIDS denialism, and climate change denial. The forms of denialism present the common feature of the person rejecting overwhelming evidence and trying to generate political controversy in attempts to deny the existence of consensus.

In psychology, denialism is a person's choice to deny reality as a way to avoid believing in an uncomfortable truth. Denialism is an essentially irrational human behavior that withholds the validation of a historical experience or event when a person refuses to accept an empirically verifiable reality.

The motivations and causes of denialism include religion, self-interest (economic, political, or financial), and defence mechanisms meant to protect the psyche of the denialist against mentally disturbing facts and ideas; such disturbance is called cognitive dissonance.

Definition and tactics

Anthropologist Didier Fassin distinguishes between denial, defined as "the empirical observation that reality and truth are being denied", and denialism, which he defines as "an ideological position whereby one systematically reacts by refusing reality and truth". Persons and social groups who reject propositions on which there exists a mainstream and scientific consensus engage in denialism when they use rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument and legitimate debate, when there is none. It is a process that operates by employing one or more of the following five tactics to maintain the appearance of legitimate controversy:

1. Conspiracy theories – Dismissing the data or observation by suggesting opponents are involved in "a conspiracy to suppress the truth".
2. Cherry picking – Selecting an anomalous critical paper supporting their idea, or using outdated, flawed, and discredited papers to make their opponents look as though they base their ideas on weak research. Diethelm and McKee (2009) note, "Denialists are usually not deterred by the extreme isolation of their theories, but rather see it as an indication of their intellectual courage against the dominant orthodoxy and the accompanying political correctness."
3. False experts – Paying an expert in the field, or another field, to lend supporting evidence or credibility. This goes hand-in-hand with the marginalization of real experts and researchers.
4. Moving the goalposts – Dismissing evidence presented in response to a specific claim by continually demanding some other (often unfulfillable) piece of evidence (aka Shifting baseline)
5. Other logical fallacies – Usually one or more of false analogy, appeal to consequences, straw man, or red herring.

Common tactics to different types of denialism include misrepresenting evidence, false equivalence, half-truths, and outright fabrication. South African judge Edwin Cameron notes that a common tactic used by denialists is to "make great play of the inescapable indeterminacy of figures and statistics". Historian Taner Akçam states that denialism is commonly believed to be negation of facts, but in fact "it is in that nebulous territory between facts and truth where such denialism germinates. Denialism marshals its own facts and it has its own truth."

Focusing on the rhetorical tactics through which denialism is achieved in language, in Alex Gillespie (2020)^[17] of the London School of Economics has reviewed the linguistic and practical defensive tactics for denying disruptive information. These tactics are conceptualized in terms of three layers of defence:

1. Avoiding – The first line of defence against disruptive information is to avoid it.
2. Delegitimizing – The second line of defence is to attack the messenger, by undermining the credibility of the source.
3. Limiting – The final line of defence, if disruptive information cannot be avoided or delegitimized, is to rationalize and limit the impact of the disruptive ideas.

In 2009, author Michael Specter defined group denialism as "when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie".

Prescriptive and polemic perspectives

If one party to a debate accuses the other of denialism they are framing the debate. This is because an accusation of denialism is both prescriptive and polemic: prescriptive because it carries implications that there is truth to the denied claim; polemic since the accuser implies that continued denial in the light of presented evidence raises questions about the other's motives. Edward Skidelsky, a lecturer in philosophy at Exeter University writes that "An accusation of 'denial' is serious, suggesting either deliberate dishonesty or self-deception. The thing being denied is, by implication, so obviously true that the denier must be driven by perversity, malice or wilful blindness." He suggests that, by the introduction of the word denier into further areas of historical and scientific debate, "One of the great achievements of The Enlightenment – the liberation of historical and scientific enquiry from dogma – is quietly being reversed".

Some people have suggested that because denial of the Holocaust is well known, advocates who use the term denialist in other areas of debate may intentionally or unintentionally imply that their opponents are little better than Holocaust deniers. However, Robert Gallo et al. defended this latter comparison, stating that AIDS denialism is similar to Holocaust denial since it is a form of pseudoscience that "contradicts an immense body of research".

Politics and science

Further information: Antiscience, Pseudoscience, and politicization of science

Climate change

Climate misinformation falls within categories such as ● Global warming isn't happening. ● Humans aren't causing global warming. ● Climate impacts aren't bad. ● Climate solutions won't work. ● Climate science is unreliable.

Climate change denial (also global warming denial) is a form of science denial characterized by rejecting, refusing to acknowledge, disputing, or fighting the extensive evidence for anthropogenic global warming that has led to a scientific consensus on climate change. Those promoting denial commonly use rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of a scientific controversy where none exists. Climate change denial includes raising unreasonable doubts about the extent to which climate change is caused by humans, its effects on nature and human society, and understating the costs of climate change adaptation while overstating the costs of mitigating it. To a lesser extent, climate change denial can also be implicit when people accept the science but fail to reconcile it with their belief or action. Several studies have analyzed these positions as forms of denialism, pseudoscience, or propaganda.

Many issues that are settled in the scientific community, such as human responsibility for climate change, remain the subject of politically or economically motivated attempts to downplay, dismiss or deny them—an ideological phenomenon academics and scientists call climate change denial. Climate scientists, especially in the United States, have reported government and oil-industry pressure to censor or suppress their work and hide scientific data, with directives not to discuss the subject publicly. The fossil fuels lobby has been identified as overtly or covertly supporting efforts to undermine or discredit the scientific consensus on climate change.

HIV/AIDS

Main article: HIV/AIDS denialism

AIDS denialism is the denial that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is the cause of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). AIDS denialism has been described as being "among the most vocal anti-science denial movements". Some denialists reject the existence of HIV, while others accept that the virus exists but say that it is a harmless passenger virus and not the cause of AIDS. Insofar as denialists acknowledge AIDS as a real disease, they attribute it to some combination of recreational drug use, malnutrition, poor sanitation, and side effects of antiretroviral medication, rather than infection with HIV. However, the evidence that HIV causes AIDS is scientifically conclusive and the scientific community rejects and ignores AIDS-denialist claims as based on faulty reasoning, cherry picking, and misrepresentation of mainly outdated scientific data. With the rejection of these arguments by the scientific community, AIDS-denialist material is now spread mainly through the Internet.

Thabo Mbeki, former president of South Africa, embraced AIDS denialism, proclaiming that AIDS was primarily caused by poverty. About 365,000 people died from AIDS during his presidency; it is estimated that around 343,000 premature deaths could have been prevented if proper treatment had been available.

COVID-19

Main article: COVID-19 misinformation

 

After the December 2020 introduction of COVID vaccines, a partisan gap in death rates developed, indicating the effects of vaccine skepticism. As of March 2024, more than 30 percent of Republicans had not received a Covid vaccine, compared with less than 10 percent of Democrats.

 

"COVID is a lie" graffiti in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, England

The term "COVID-19 denialism" or merely "COVID denialism" refers to the thinking of those who deny the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic, at least to the extent of denying the scientifically recognized COVID mortality data of the World Health Organization. The claims that the COVID-19 pandemic has been faked, exaggerated, or mischaracterized are pseudoscience. Some famous people who have engaged in COVID-19 denialism include Elon Musk, U.S. President Donald Trump, and former Brazilian President Bolsonaro.

Evolution

Main article: Rejection of evolution by religious groups

Religious beliefs may prompt an individual to deny the validity of the scientific theory of evolution. Evolution is considered an undisputed fact within the scientific community and in academia, where the level of support for evolution is essentially universal, yet this view is often met with opposition by biblical literalists. The alternative view is often presented as a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis's creation myth. Many fundamentalist Christians teach creationism as if it were fact under the banners of creation science and intelligent design. Beliefs that typically coincide with creationism include the belief in the global flood myth, geocentrism, and the belief that the Earth is only 6,000–10,000 years old. These beliefs are viewed as pseudoscience in the scientific community and are widely regarded as erroneous.

Flat Earth

Main articles: Flat Earth and Modern flat Earth beliefs

The superseded belief that the Earth is flat, and denial of all of the overwhelming evidence that supports an approximately spherical Earth that rotates around its axis and orbits the Sun, persists into the 21st century. Modern proponents of flat-Earth cosmology (or flat-Earthers) refuse to accept any kind of contrary evidence, dismissing all spaceflights and images from space as hoaxes and accusing all organizations and even private citizens of conspiring to "hide the truth". They also claim that no actual satellites are orbiting the Earth, that the International Space Station is fake, and that these are lies from all governments involved in this grand cover-up. Some even believe other planets and stars are hoaxes.

Adherents of the modern flat-earth model propose that a dome-shaped firmament encloses a disk-shaped Earth. They may also claim, after Samuel Rowbotham, that the Sun is only 3,000 miles (4,800 km) above the Earth and that the Moon and the Sun orbit above the Earth rather than around it. Modern flat-earthers believe that Antarctica is not a continent but a massive ice floe, with a wall 150 feet (46 m) or higher, which circles the perimeter of the Earth and keeps everything (including all the oceans' water) from falling off the edge.

Flat-Earthers also assert that no one is allowed to fly over or explore Antarctica, despite contrary evidence. According to them, all photos and videos of ships sinking under the horizon and of the bottoms of city skylines and clouds below the horizon, revealing the curvature of the Earth, have been manipulated, computer-generated, or somehow faked. Therefore, regardless of any scientific or empirical evidence provided, flat-Earthers conclude that it is fabricated or altered in some way.

When linked to other observed phenomena such as gravity, sunsets, tides, eclipses, distances and other measurements that challenge the flat earth model, claimants replace commonly accepted explanations with piecemeal models that distort or over-simplify how perspective, mass, buoyancy, light or other physical systems work. These piecemeal replacements rarely conform with each other, finally leaving many flat-Earth claimants to agree that such phenomena remain "mysteries" and more investigation is to be done. In this conclusion, adherents remain open to all explanations except the commonly accepted globular Earth model, shifting the debate from ignorance to denialism.

Genetically modified foods

Main article: Genetically modified food controversies

See also: GMO conspiracy theories

There is a scientific consensus that currently available food derived from genetically modified crops (GM) poses no greater risk to human health than conventional food, but that each GM food needs to be tested on a case-by-case basis before introduction. Nonetheless, members of the public are much less likely than scientists to perceive GM foods as safe. The legal and regulatory status of GM foods varies by country, with some nations banning or restricting them, and others permitting them with widely differing degrees of regulation.

Psychological analyses indicate that over 70% of GM food opponents in the US are "absolute" in their opposition, experience disgust at the thought of eating GM foods, and are "evidence insensitive".

Statins

Statin denialism is a rejection of the medical worth of statins, a class of cholesterol-lowering drugs. Cardiologist Steven Nissen at Cleveland Clinic has commented "We are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of our patients to Web sites..." promoting unproven medical therapies. Harriet Hall sees a spectrum of statin denialism ranging from pseudoscientific claims to the understatement of benefits and overstatement of side effects, all of which is contrary to the scientific evidence.

Mental illness denial

Main article: Mental illness denial

Mental illness denial or mental disorder denial is where a person denies the existence of mental disorders. Serious analysts, as well as pseudoscientific movements, question the existence of certain disorders. A minority of professional researchers see disorders such as depression from a sociocultural perspective and argue that the solution to it is fixing a dysfunction in society, not in the person's brain. Some people may also deny that they have a mental illness after being diagnosed, and certain analysts argue this denialism is usually fueled by narcissistic injury. Anti-psychiatry movements such as Scientology promote mental illness denial by having alternative practices to psychiatry.

Election denial

See also: Election denial movement in the United States

Election denial is baseless rejection of the outcome of a fair election. Since the 2020 United States presidential election, there has been an ongoing narrative asserting that it was fraudulent. Similar events have occurred in different countries: Brazil in 2022 when former president Jair Bolsonaro after his defeat in the 2022 Brazilian general election, questioning the accuracy of the country's electronic voting system. In the 2021 Peruvian general election, presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori alleged fraud and irregularities in the voting count which were disproved by election authorities and international observers.

Historiography

Main article: Historical negationism

Historical negationism, the denialism of widely accepted historical facts, is a major source of concern among historians and it is frequently used to falsify or distort accepted historical events. In attempting to revise the past, negationists are distinguished by the use of techniques inadmissible in proper historical discourse, such as presenting known forged documents as genuine, inventing ingenious but implausible reasons for distrusting genuine documents, attributing conclusions to books and sources that report the opposite, manipulating statistical series to support the given point of view, and deliberately mistranslating texts.

Some countries, such as Germany, have criminalized the negationist revision of certain historical events, while other countries take a more cautious position for various reasons, such as the protection of free speech. Others mandate negationist views, such as California, where schoolchildren have been explicitly prevented from learning about the California genocide.

Armenian genocide denialism

The Iğdır Genocide Memorial and Museum promotes the false view that Armenians committed genocide against Turks, rather than vice versa.

Armenian genocide denial is the negationist claim that the Ottoman Empire and its ruling party, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), did not commit genocide against its Armenian citizens during World War I—a crime documented in a large body of evidence and affirmed by the vast majority of scholars. The perpetrators denied the genocide as they carried it out, claiming that Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were resettled for military reasons, not exterminated. In its aftermath, incriminating documents were systematically destroyed. Since the 1920s, denial has been the policy of every government of the Ottoman Empire's successor state, the Republic of Turkey.

Borrowing arguments used by the CUP to justify its actions, Armenian genocide denial rests on the notion that the deportation of Armenians was a legitimate state action in response to an alleged Armenian uprising that threatened the empire's existence during wartime. Deniers assert that the CUP intended to resettle Armenians, not kill them. They claim the death toll is exaggerated or attribute the deaths to other factors, such as a purported civil war, disease, bad weather, rogue local officials, or bands of Kurds and outlaws. The historian Ronald Grigor Suny summarizes the main argument as: "There was no genocide, and the Armenians were to blame for it."

A critical reason for denial is that the genocide enabled the establishment of a Turkish nation-state; recognizing it would contradict Turkey's founding myths. Since the 1920s, Turkey has worked to prevent recognition or even mention of the genocide in other countries. It has spent millions of dollars on lobbying, created research institutes, and used intimidation and threats. Denial, according to Donald Bloxham, is usually accompanied by "rhetoric of Armenian treachery, aggression, criminality, and territorial ambition". Denial affects Turkey's domestic policies and is taught in Turkish schools; some Turkish citizens who recognize the genocide have faced prosecution for "insulting Turkishness". Turkey's century-long effort to deny the genocide sets it apart from other historical cases of genocide.

Azerbaijan, a close ally of Turkey, also denies the genocide and campaigns against its recognition internationally. Most Turkish citizens and political parties support Turkey's denial policy. Scholars argue that Armenian genocide denial has set the tone for the government's attitude towards minorities, and has contributed to the ongoing violence against Kurds in Turkey. A 2014 poll of 1,500 people conducted by EDAM, a Turkish think tank, found that nine percent of Turkish citizens recognize the genocide.

Holocaust denialism

Main article: Holocaust denial

Holocaust denial refers to the denial of the murder of 5 to 6 million Jews by the Nazis in Europe during World War 2. In this context, the term is a subset of genocide denial, which is a form of politically motivated denialism.

Nakba denialism

Main article: Nakba denial

Nakba denial refers to attempts to downgrade, deny and misdescribe the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians during the Nakba, in which four-fifths of all Palestinians were driven off their lands and into exile.

Srebrenica massacre denialism

Further information: Srebrenica massacre § Denial

Sonja Biserko, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, and Edina Bečirević, the Faculty of Criminalistics, Criminology and Security Studies of the University of Sarajevo have pointed to a culture of denial of the Srebrenica massacre in Serbian society, taking many forms and present in particular in political discourse, the media, the law and the educational system.

Confirmation bias

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias 

Confirmation bias (also confirmatory bias, myside bias, or congeniality bias) is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values or decisions. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, emotionally charged issues and deeply entrenched beliefs.

Biased search for information, biased interpretation of this information and biased memory recall have been invoked to explain four specific effects:

1. attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme despite the different parties being exposed to the same evidence)
2. belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false)
3. the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series)
4. illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).

A series of psychological experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs. Later work reinterpreted these results as a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Another proposal is that people show confirmation bias because they are pragmatically assessing the costs of being wrong rather than investigating in a neutral, scientific way.

Flawed decisions due to confirmation bias have been found in a wide range of political, organizational, financial and scientific contexts. These biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. For example, confirmation bias produces systematic errors in scientific research based on inductive reasoning (the gradual accumulation of supportive evidence). Similarly, a police detective may identify a suspect early in an investigation, but then may only seek confirming rather than disconfirming evidence. A medical practitioner may prematurely focus on a particular disorder early in a diagnostic session, and then seek only confirming evidence. In social media, confirmation bias is amplified by the use of filter bubbles and "algorithmic editing", which display to individuals only information they are likely to agree with, while excluding opposing views.

Definition and context

Confirmation bias, previously used as a "catch-all phrase", was refined by English psychologist Peter Wason, as "a preference for information that is consistent with a hypothesis rather than information which opposes it."

Confirmation biases are effects in information processing. They differ from what is sometimes called the behavioral confirmation effect, commonly known as self-fulfilling prophecy, in which a person's expectations influence their own behavior, bringing about the expected result.

Some psychologists restrict the term "confirmation bias" to selective collection of evidence that supports what one already believes while ignoring or rejecting evidence that supports a different conclusion. Others apply the term more broadly to the tendency to preserve one's existing beliefs when searching for evidence, interpreting it, or recalling it from memory. Confirmation bias is a result of automatic, unintentional strategies rather than deliberate deception.

Types

Biased search for information

Confirmation bias has been described as an internal "yes man", echoing back a person's beliefs like Charles Dickens's character Uriah Heep.

Experiments have found repeatedly that people tend to test hypotheses in a one-sided way, by searching for evidence consistent with their current hypothesis. Rather than searching through all the relevant evidence, they phrase questions to receive an affirmative answer that supports their theory. They look for the consequences that they would expect if their hypothesis were true, rather than what would happen if it were false. For example, someone using yes/no questions to find a number they suspect to be the number 3 might ask, "Is it an odd number?" People prefer this type of question, called a "positive test", even when a negative test such as "Is it an even number?" would yield exactly the same information. However, this does not mean that people seek tests that guarantee a positive answer. In studies where subjects could select either such pseudo-tests or genuinely diagnostic ones, they favored the genuinely diagnostic.

The preference for positive tests in itself is not a bias, since positive tests can be highly informative. However, in combination with other effects, this strategy can confirm existing beliefs or assumptions, independently of whether they are true. In real-world situations, evidence is often complex and mixed. For example, various contradictory ideas about someone could each be supported by concentrating on one aspect of his or her behavior. Thus any search for evidence in favor of a hypothesis is likely to succeed. One illustration of this is the way the phrasing of a question can significantly change the answer. For example, people who are asked, "Are you happy with your social life?" report greater satisfaction than those asked, "Are you unhappy with your social life?"

Even a small change in a question's wording can affect how people search through available information, and hence the conclusions they reach. This was shown using a fictional child custody case. Participants read that Parent A was moderately suitable to be the guardian in multiple ways. Parent B had a mix of salient positive and negative qualities: a close relationship with the child but a job that would take them away for long periods of time. When asked, "Which parent should have custody of the child?" the majority of participants chose Parent B, looking mainly for positive attributes. However, when asked, "Which parent should be denied custody of the child?" they looked for negative attributes and the majority answered that Parent B should be denied custody, implying that Parent A should have custody.

Similar studies have demonstrated how people engage in a biased search for information, but also that this phenomenon may be limited by a preference for genuine diagnostic tests. In an initial experiment, participants rated another person on the introversion–extroversion personality dimension on the basis of an interview. They chose the interview questions from a given list. When the interviewee was introduced as an introvert, the participants chose questions that presumed introversion, such as, "What do you find unpleasant about noisy parties?" When the interviewee was described as extroverted, almost all the questions presumed extroversion, such as, "What would you do to liven up a dull party?" These loaded questions gave the interviewees little or no opportunity to falsify the hypothesis about them. A later version of the experiment gave the participants less presumptive questions to choose from, such as, "Do you shy away from social interactions?" Participants preferred to ask these more diagnostic questions, showing only a weak bias towards positive tests. This pattern, of a main preference for diagnostic tests and a weaker preference for positive tests, has been replicated in other studies.

Personality traits influence and interact with biased search processes. Individuals vary in their abilities to defend their attitudes from external attacks in relation to selective exposure. Selective exposure occurs when individuals search for information that is consistent, rather than inconsistent, with their personal beliefs. An experiment examined the extent to which individuals could refute arguments that contradicted their personal beliefs. People with high confidence levels more readily seek out contradictory information to their personal position to form an argument. This can take the form of an oppositional news consumption, where individuals seek opposing partisan news in order to counterargue. Individuals with low confidence levels do not seek out contradictory information and prefer information that supports their personal position. People generate and evaluate evidence in arguments that are biased towards their own beliefs and opinions. Heightened confidence levels decrease preference for information that supports individuals' personal beliefs.

Another experiment gave participants a complex rule-discovery task that involved moving objects simulated by a computer. Objects on the computer screen followed specific laws, which the participants had to figure out. So, participants could "fire" objects across the screen to test their hypotheses. Despite making many attempts over a ten-hour session, none of the participants figured out the rules of the system. They typically attempted to confirm rather than falsify their hypotheses, and were reluctant to consider alternatives. Even after seeing objective evidence that refuted their working hypotheses, they frequently continued doing the same tests. Some of the participants were taught proper hypothesis-testing, but these instructions had almost no effect.

Biased interpretation of information

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

—Michael Shermer

Confirmation biases are not limited to the collection of evidence. Even if two individuals have the same information, the way they interpret it can be biased.

A team at Stanford University conducted an experiment involving participants who felt strongly about capital punishment, with half in favor and half against it. Each participant read descriptions of two studies: a comparison of U.S. states with and without the death penalty, and a comparison of murder rates in a state before and after the introduction of the death penalty. After reading a quick description of each study, the participants were asked whether their opinions had changed. Then, they read a more detailed account of each study's procedure and had to rate whether the research was well-conducted and convincing. In fact, the studies were fictional. Half the participants were told that one kind of study supported the deterrent effect and the other undermined it, while for other participants the conclusions were swapped.

The participants, whether supporters or opponents, reported shifting their attitudes slightly in the direction of the first study they read. Once they read the more detailed descriptions of the two studies, they almost all returned to their original belief regardless of the evidence provided, pointing to details that supported their viewpoint and disregarding anything contrary. Participants described studies supporting their pre-existing view as superior to those that contradicted it, in detailed and specific ways. Writing about a study that seemed to undermine the deterrence effect, a death penalty proponent wrote, "The research didn't cover a long enough period of time," while an opponent's comment on the same study said, "No strong evidence to contradict the researchers has been presented." The results illustrated that people set higher standards of evidence for hypotheses that go against their current expectations. This effect, known as "disconfirmation bias", has been supported by other experiments.

Another study of biased interpretation occurred during the 2004 U.S. presidential election and involved participants who reported having strong feelings about the candidates. They were shown apparently contradictory pairs of statements, either from Republican candidate George W. Bush, Democratic candidate John Kerry or a politically neutral public figure. They were also given further statements that made the apparent contradiction seem reasonable. From these three pieces of information, they had to decide whether each individual's statements were inconsistent. There were strong differences in these evaluations, with participants much more likely to interpret statements from the candidate they opposed as contradictory.

An MRI scanner allowed researchers to examine how the human brain deals with dissonant information.

In this experiment, the participants made their judgments while in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner which monitored their brain activity. As participants evaluated contradictory statements by their favored candidate, emotional centers of their brains were aroused. This did not happen with the statements by the other figures. The experimenters inferred that the different responses to the statements were not due to passive reasoning errors. Instead, the participants were actively reducing the cognitive dissonance induced by reading about their favored candidate's irrational or hypocritical behavior.

Biases in belief interpretation are persistent, regardless of intelligence level. Participants in an experiment took the SAT test (a college admissions test used in the United States) to assess their intelligence levels. They then read information regarding safety concerns for vehicles, and the experimenters manipulated the national origin of the car. American participants provided their opinion if the car should be banned on a six-point scale, where one indicated "definitely yes" and six indicated "definitely no". Participants firstly evaluated if they would allow a dangerous German car on American streets and a dangerous American car on German streets. Participants believed that the dangerous German car on American streets should be banned more quickly than the dangerous American car on German streets. There was no difference among intelligence levels at the rate participants would ban a car.

Biased interpretation is not restricted to emotionally significant topics. In another experiment, participants were told a story about a theft. They had to rate the evidential importance of statements arguing either for or against a particular character being responsible. When they hypothesized that character's guilt, they rated statements supporting that hypothesis as more important than conflicting statements.

Biased recall of information

People may remember evidence selectively to reinforce their expectations, even if they gather and interpret evidence in a neutral manner. This effect is called "selective recall", "confirmatory memory", or "access-biased memory". Psychological theories differ in their predictions about selective recall. Schema theory predicts that information matching prior expectations will be more easily stored and recalled than information that does not match. Some alternative approaches say that surprising information stands out and so is memorable. Predictions from both these theories have been confirmed in different experimental contexts, with no theory winning outright.

In one study, participants read a profile of a woman which described a mix of introverted and extroverted behaviors. They later had to recall examples of her introversion and extroversion. One group was told this was to assess the woman for a job as a librarian, while a second group were told it was for a job in real estate sales. There was a significant difference between what these two groups recalled, with the "librarian" group recalling more examples of introversion and the "sales" groups recalling more extroverted behavior. A selective memory effect has also been shown in experiments that manipulate the desirability of personality types. In one of these, a group of participants were shown evidence that extroverted people are more successful than introverts. Another group were told the opposite. In a subsequent, apparently unrelated study, participants were asked to recall events from their lives in which they had been either introverted or extroverted. Each group of participants provided more memories connecting themselves with the more desirable personality type, and recalled those memories more quickly.

Changes in emotional states can also influence memory recall. Participants rated how they felt when they had first learned that O. J. Simpson had been acquitted of murder charges. They described their emotional reactions and confidence regarding the verdict one week, two months, and one year after the trial. Results indicated that participants' assessments for Simpson's guilt changed over time. The more that participants' opinion of the verdict had changed, the less stable were the participant's memories regarding their initial emotional reactions. When participants recalled their initial emotional reactions two months and a year later, past appraisals closely resembled current appraisals of emotion. People demonstrate sizable myside bias when discussing their opinions on controversial topics. Memory recall and construction of experiences undergo revision in relation to corresponding emotional states.

Myside bias has been shown to influence the accuracy of memory recall. In an experiment, widows and widowers rated the intensity of their experienced grief six months and five years after the deaths of their spouses. Participants noted a higher experience of grief at six months rather than at five years. Yet, when the participants were asked after five years how they had felt six months after the death of their significant other, the intensity of grief participants recalled was highly correlated with their current level of grief. Individuals appear to utilize their current emotional states to analyze how they must have felt when experiencing past events. Emotional memories are reconstructed by current emotional states.

One study showed how selective memory can maintain belief in extrasensory perception (ESP). Believers and disbelievers were each shown descriptions of ESP experiments. Half of each group were told that the experimental results supported the existence of ESP, while the others were told they did not. In a subsequent test, participants recalled the material accurately, apart from believers who had read the non-supportive evidence. This group remembered significantly less information and some of them incorrectly remembered the results as supporting ESP.

Individual differences

Myside bias was once believed to be correlated with intelligence; however, studies have shown that myside bias can be more influenced by ability to rationally think as opposed to level of intelligence. Myside bias can cause an inability to effectively and logically evaluate the opposite side of an argument. Studies have stated that myside bias is an absence of "active open-mindedness", meaning the active search for why an initial idea may be wrong. Typically, myside bias is operationalized in empirical studies as the quantity of evidence used in support of their side in comparison to the opposite side.

A study has found individual differences in myside bias. This study investigates individual differences that are acquired through learning in a cultural context and are mutable. The researcher found important individual difference in argumentation. Studies have suggested that individual differences such as deductive reasoning ability, ability to overcome belief bias, epistemological understanding, and thinking disposition are significant predictors of the reasoning and generating arguments, counterarguments, and rebuttals.

A study by Christopher Wolfe and Anne Britt also investigated how participants' views of "what makes a good argument?" can be a source of myside bias that influences the way a person formulates their own arguments. The study investigated individual differences of argumentation schema and asked participants to write essays. The participants were randomly assigned to write essays either for or against their preferred side of an argument and were given research instructions that took either a balanced or an unrestricted approach. The balanced-research instructions directed participants to create a "balanced" argument, i.e., that included both pros and cons; the unrestricted-research instructions included nothing on how to create the argument.

Overall, the results revealed that the balanced-research instructions significantly increased the incidence of opposing information in arguments. These data also reveal that personal belief is not a source of myside bias; however, that those participants, who believe that a good argument is one that is based on facts, are more likely to exhibit myside bias than other participants. This evidence is consistent with the claims proposed in Baron's article—that people's opinions about what makes good thinking can influence how arguments are generated.

Discovery

Informal observations

Francis Bacon

Before psychological research on confirmation bias, the phenomenon had been observed throughout history. Beginning with the Greek historian Thucydides (c. 460 BC – c. 395 BC), who wrote of misguided reason in The Peloponnesian War; "... for it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy". Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) noted it in the Divine Comedy, in which St. Thomas Aquinas cautions Dante upon meeting in Paradise, "opinion—hasty—often can incline to the wrong side, and then affection for one's own opinion binds, confines the mind". Ibn Khaldun noticed the same effect in his Muqaddimah:

Untruth naturally afflicts historical information. There are various reasons that make this unavoidable. One of them is partisanship for opinions and schools. ... if the soul is infected with partisanship for a particular opinion or sect, it accepts without a moment's hesitation the information that is agreeable to it. Prejudice and partisanship obscure the critical faculty and preclude critical investigation. The result is that falsehoods are accepted and transmitted.

In the Novum Organum, English philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon (1561–1626) noted that biased assessment of evidence drove "all superstitions, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments or the like". He wrote:

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion ... draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects or despises, or else by some distinction sets aside or rejects[.]

In the second volume of his The World as Will and Representation (1844), German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer observed that "An adopted hypothesis gives us lynx-eyes for everything that confirms it and makes us blind to everything that contradicts it."

In his essay (1897) What Is Art?, Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote:

I know that most men—not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever, and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic problems—can very seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as to oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty—conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives.

In his essay (1894) The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Tolstoy had earlier written:

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

Hypothesis-testing (falsification) explanation (Wason)

Main article: Wason selection task

In Peter Wason's initial experiment published in 1960 (which does not mention the term "confirmation bias"), he repeatedly challenged participants to identify a rule applying to triples of numbers. They were told that (2,4,6) fits the rule. They generated triples, and the experimenter told them whether each triple conformed to the rule.

The actual rule was simply "any ascending sequence", but participants had great difficulty in finding it, often announcing rules that were far more specific, such as "the middle number is the average of the first and last". The participants seemed to test only positive examples—triples that obeyed their hypothesized rule. For example, if they thought the rule was, "Each number is two greater than its predecessor," they would offer a triple that fitted (confirmed) this rule, such as (11,13,15) rather than a triple that violated (falsified) it, such as (11,12,19).

Wason interpreted his results as showing a preference for confirmation over falsification, hence he coined the term "confirmation bias". Wason also used confirmation bias to explain the results of his selection task experiment. Participants repeatedly performed badly on various forms of this test, in most cases ignoring information that could potentially refute (falsify) the specified rule.

Hypothesis testing (positive test strategy) explanation (Klayman and Ha)

Klayman and Ha's 1987 paper argues that the Wason experiments do not actually demonstrate a bias towards confirmation, but instead a tendency to make tests consistent with the working hypothesis. They called this the "positive test strategy". This strategy is an example of a heuristic: a reasoning shortcut that is imperfect but easy to compute. Klayman and Ha used Bayesian probability and information theory as their standard of hypothesis-testing, rather than the falsificationism used by Wason. According to these ideas, each answer to a question yields a different amount of information, which depends on the person's prior beliefs. Thus a scientific test of a hypothesis is one that is expected to produce the most information. Since the information content depends on initial probabilities, a positive test can either be highly informative or uninformative. Klayman and Ha argued that when people think about realistic problems, they are looking for a specific answer with a small initial probability. In this case, positive tests are usually more informative than negative tests. However, in Wason's rule discovery task the answer—three numbers in ascending order—is very broad, so positive tests are unlikely to yield informative answers. Klayman and Ha supported their analysis by citing an experiment that used the labels "DAX" and "MED" in place of "fits the rule" and "doesn't fit the rule". This avoided implying that the aim was to find a low-probability rule. Participants had much more success with this version of the experiment.

If the true rule (T) encompasses the current hypothesis (H), then positive tests (examining an H to see if it is T) will not show that the hypothesis is false.

If the true rule (T) overlaps the current hypothesis (H), then either a negative test or a positive test can potentially falsify H.

When the working hypothesis (H) includes the true rule (T) then positive tests are the only way to falsify H.

In light of this and other critiques, the focus of research moved away from confirmation versus falsification of an hypothesis, to examining whether people test hypotheses in an informative way, or an uninformative but positive way. The search for "true" confirmation bias led psychologists to look at a wider range of effects in how people process information.

Information processing explanations

There are currently three main information processing explanations of confirmation bias, plus a recent addition.

Cognitive versus motivational

Happy events are more likely to be remembered.

According to Robert MacCoun, most biased evidence processing occurs through a combination of "cold" (cognitive) and "hot" (motivated) mechanisms.

Cognitive explanations for confirmation bias are based on limitations in people's ability to handle complex tasks, and the shortcuts, called heuristics, that they use. For example, people may judge the reliability of evidence by using the availability heuristic that is, how readily a particular idea comes to mind. It is also possible that people can only focus on one thought at a time, so find it difficult to test alternative hypotheses in parallel. Another heuristic is the positive test strategy identified by Klayman and Ha, in which people test a hypothesis by examining cases where they expect a property or event to occur. This heuristic avoids the difficult or impossible task of working out how diagnostic each possible question will be. However, it is not universally reliable, so people can overlook challenges to their existing beliefs.

Motivational explanations involve an effect of desire on belief. It is known that people prefer positive thoughts over negative ones in a number of ways: this is called the "Pollyanna principle". Applied to arguments or sources of evidence, this could explain why desired conclusions are more likely to be believed true. According to experiments that manipulate the desirability of the conclusion, people demand a high standard of evidence for unpalatable ideas and a low standard for preferred ideas. In other words, they ask, "Can I believe this?" for some suggestions and, "Must I believe this?" for others. Although consistency is a desirable feature of attitudes, an excessive drive for consistency is another potential source of bias because it may prevent people from neutrally evaluating new, surprising information. Social psychologist Ziva Kunda combines the cognitive and motivational theories, arguing that motivation creates the bias, but cognitive factors determine the size of the effect.

Cost-benefit

Explanations in terms of cost-benefit analysis assume that people do not just test hypotheses in a disinterested way, but assess the costs of different errors. Using ideas from evolutionary psychology, James Friedrich suggests that people do not primarily aim at truth in testing hypotheses, but try to avoid the most costly errors. For example, employers might ask one-sided questions in job interviews because they are focused on weeding out unsuitable candidates. Yaacov Trope and Akiva Liberman's refinement of this theory assumes that people compare the two different kinds of error: accepting a false hypothesis or rejecting a true hypothesis. For instance, someone who underestimates a friend's honesty might treat him or her suspiciously and so undermine the friendship. Overestimating the friend's honesty may also be costly, but less so. In this case, it would be rational to seek, evaluate or remember evidence of their honesty in a biased way. When someone gives an initial impression of being introverted or extroverted, questions that match that impression come across as more empathic. This suggests that when talking to someone who seems to be an introvert, it is a sign of better social skills to ask, "Do you feel awkward in social situations?" rather than, "Do you like noisy parties?" The connection between confirmation bias and social skills was corroborated by a study of how college students get to know other people. Highly self-monitoring students, who are more sensitive to their environment and to social norms, asked more matching questions when interviewing a high-status staff member than when getting to know fellow students.

Exploratory versus confirmatory

Psychologists Jennifer Lerner and Philip Tetlock distinguish two different kinds of thinking process. Exploratory thought neutrally considers multiple points of view and tries to anticipate all possible objections to a particular position, while confirmatory thought seeks to justify a specific point of view. Lerner and Tetlock say that when people expect to justify their position to others whose views they already know, they will tend to adopt a similar position to those people, and then use confirmatory thought to bolster their own credibility. However, if the external parties are overly aggressive or critical, people will disengage from thought altogether, and simply assert their personal opinions without justification. Lerner and Tetlock say that people only push themselves to think critically and logically when they know in advance they will need to explain themselves to others who are well-informed, genuinely interested in the truth, and whose views they do not already know. Because those conditions rarely exist, they argue, most people are using confirmatory thought most of the time.

Make-believe

Developmental psychologist Eve Whitmore has argued that beliefs and biases involved in confirmation bias have their roots in childhood coping through make-believe, which becomes "the basis for more complex forms of self-deception and illusion into adulthood." The friction brought on by questioning as an adolescent with developing critical thinking can lead to the rationalization of false beliefs, and the habit of such rationalization can become unconscious over the years.

Optimal information acquisition

Recent research in economics has challenged the traditional view of confirmation bias as purely a cognitive flaw. Under conditions where acquiring and processing information is costly, seeking confirmatory evidence can actually be an optimal strategy. Instead of pursuing contrarian or disconfirming evidence, it may be more efficient to focus on sources likely to align with one's existing beliefs, given the constraints on time and resources.

Economist Weijie Zhong has developed a model demonstrating that individuals who must make decisions under time pressure, and who face costs for obtaining more information, will often prefer confirmatory signals. According to this model, when individuals believe strongly in a certain hypothesis, they optimally seek information that confirms it, allowing them to build confidence more efficiently. If the expected confirmatory signals are not received, their confidence in the initial hypothesis will gradually decline, leading to belief updating. This approach shows that seeking confirmation is not necessarily biased but may be a rational allocation of limited attention and resources.

Real-world effects

Social media

In social media, confirmation bias is amplified by the use of filter bubbles and echo chambers (or "algorithmic editing"), which displays to individuals only information they are likely to agree with, while excluding opposing views. Some have argued that confirmation bias is the reason why society can never escape from filter bubbles, because individuals are psychologically hardwired to seek information that agrees with their preexisting values and beliefs. Others have further argued that the mixture of the two is degrading democracy—claiming that this "algorithmic editing" removes diverse viewpoints and information—and that unless filter bubble algorithms are removed, voters will be unable to make fully informed political decisions.

The rise of social media has contributed greatly to the rapid spread of fake news, that is, false and misleading information that is presented as credible news from a seemingly reliable source. Confirmation bias (selecting or reinterpreting evidence to support one's beliefs) is one of three main hurdles cited as to why critical thinking goes astray in these circumstances. The other two are shortcut heuristics (when overwhelmed or short of time, people rely on simple rules such as group consensus or trusting an expert or role model) and social goals (social motivation or peer pressure can interfere with objective analysis of facts at hand).

In combating the spread of fake news, social media sites have considered turning toward "digital nudging". This can currently be done in two different forms of nudging. This includes nudging of information and nudging of presentation. Nudging of information entails social media sites providing a disclaimer or label questioning or warning users of the validity of the source while nudging of presentation includes exposing users to new information which they may not have sought out but could introduce them to viewpoints that may combat their own confirmation biases.

Science and scientific research

See also: Planck's principle, Escalation of commitment, and Replication crisis

A distinguishing feature of scientific thinking is the search for confirming or supportive evidence (inductive reasoning) as well as falsifying evidence (deductive reasoning).

Many times in the history of science, scientists have resisted new discoveries by selectively interpreting or ignoring unfavorable data. Several studies have shown that scientists rate studies that report findings consistent with their prior beliefs more favorably than studies reporting findings inconsistent with their previous beliefs.

However, assuming that the research question is relevant, the experimental design adequate and the data are clearly and comprehensively described, the empirical data obtained should be important to the scientific community and should not be viewed prejudicially, regardless of whether they conform to current theoretical predictions. In practice, researchers may misunderstand, misinterpret, or not read at all studies that contradict their preconceptions, or wrongly cite them anyway as if they actually supported their claims.

Further, confirmation biases can sustain scientific theories or research programs in the face of inadequate or even contradictory evidence. The discipline of parapsychology is often cited as an example.

An experimenter's confirmation bias can potentially affect which data are reported. Data that conflict with the experimenter's expectations may be more readily discarded as unreliable, producing the so-called file drawer effect. To combat this tendency, scientific training teaches ways to prevent bias. For example, experimental design of randomized controlled trials (coupled with their systematic review) aims to minimize sources of bias.

The social process of peer review aims to mitigate the effect of individual scientists' biases, even though the peer review process itself may be susceptible to such biases. Confirmation bias may thus be especially harmful to objective evaluations regarding nonconforming results since biased individuals may regard opposing evidence to be weak in principle and give little serious thought to revising their beliefs. Scientific innovators often meet with resistance from the scientific community, and research presenting controversial results frequently receives harsh peer review.

Finance

See also: Escalation of commitment and Sunk cost

Confirmation bias can lead investors to be overconfident, ignoring evidence that their strategies will lose money. In studies of political stock markets, investors made more profit when they resisted bias. For example, participants who interpreted a candidate's debate performance in a neutral rather than partisan way were more likely to profit. To combat the effect of confirmation bias, investors can try to adopt a contrary viewpoint "for the sake of argument". In one technique, they imagine that their investments have collapsed and ask themselves why this might happen.

Medicine and health

Cognitive biases are important variables in clinical decision-making by medical general practitioners (GPs) and medical specialists. Two important ones are confirmation bias and the overlapping availability bias. A GP may make a diagnosis early on during an examination, and then seek confirming evidence rather than falsifying evidence. This cognitive error is partly caused by the availability of evidence about the supposed disorder being diagnosed. For example, the client may have mentioned the disorder, or the GP may have recently read a much-discussed paper about the disorder. The basis of this cognitive shortcut or heuristic (termed anchoring) is that the doctor does not consider multiple possibilities based on evidence, but prematurely latches on (or anchors to) a single cause. In emergency medicine, because of time pressure, there is a high density of decision-making, and shortcuts are frequently applied. The potential failure rate of these cognitive decisions needs to be managed by education about the 30 or more cognitive biases that can occur, so as to set in place proper debiasing strategies. Confirmation bias may also cause doctors to perform unnecessary medical procedures due to pressure from adamant patients.

Mental disorders may be prone to misdiagnosis in being based upon observations and self-reporting rather than objective testing. Confirmation bias may play a role when practitioners stick with an early diagnosis.

Raymond Nickerson, a psychologist, blames confirmation bias for the ineffective medical procedures that were used for centuries before the arrival of scientific medicine. If a patient recovered, medical authorities counted the treatment as successful, rather than looking for alternative explanations such as that the disease had run its natural course. Biased assimilation is a factor in the modern appeal of alternative medicine, whose proponents are swayed by positive anecdotal evidence but treat scientific evidence hyper-critically.

Cognitive therapy was developed by Aaron T. Beck in the early 1960s and has become a popular approach. According to Beck, biased information processing is a factor in depression. His approach teaches people to treat evidence impartially, rather than selectively reinforcing negative outlooks. Phobias and hypochondria have also been shown to involve confirmation bias for threatening information.

Politics, law and policing

Mock trials allow researchers to examine confirmation biases in a realistic setting.

Nickerson argues that reasoning in judicial and political contexts is sometimes subconsciously biased, favoring conclusions that judges, juries or governments have already committed to. Since the evidence in a jury trial can be complex, and jurors often reach decisions about the verdict early on, it is reasonable to expect an attitude polarization effect. The prediction that jurors will become more extreme in their views as they see more evidence has been borne out in experiments with mock trials. Both inquisitorial and adversarial criminal justice systems are affected by confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias can be a factor in creating or extending conflicts, from emotionally charged debates to wars: by interpreting the evidence in their favor, each opposing party can become overconfident that it is in the stronger position. On the other hand, confirmation bias can result in people ignoring or misinterpreting the signs of an imminent or incipient conflict. For example, psychologists Stuart Sutherland and Thomas Kida have each argued that U.S. Navy Admiral Husband E. Kimmel showed confirmation bias when playing down the first signs of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

A two-decade study of political pundits by Philip E. Tetlock found that, on the whole, their predictions were not much better than chance. Tetlock divided experts into "foxes" who maintained multiple hypotheses, and "hedgehogs" who were more dogmatic. In general, the hedgehogs were much less accurate. Tetlock blamed their failure on confirmation bias, and specifically on their inability to make use of new information that contradicted their existing theories.

In police investigations, a detective may identify a suspect early in an investigation, but then sometimes largely seek supporting or confirming evidence, ignoring or downplaying falsifying evidence.

Self concept and self esteem

Social psychologists have identified two tendencies in the way people seek or interpret information about themselves. Self-verification is the drive to reinforce the existing self-image and self-enhancement is the drive to seek positive feedback. Both are served by confirmation biases. In experiments where people are given feedback that conflicts with their self-image, they are less likely to attend to it or remember it than when given self-verifying feedback. They reduce the impact of such information by interpreting it as unreliable. Similar experiments have found a preference for positive feedback, and the people who give it, over negative feedback.

Mass delusions

Confirmation bias can play a key role in the propagation of mass delusions. Witch trials are frequently cited as an example.

For another example, in the Seattle windshield pitting epidemic, there seemed to be a "pitting epidemic" in which windshields were damaged due to an unknown cause. As news of the apparent wave of damage spread, more and more people checked their windshields, discovered that their windshields too had been damaged, thus confirming belief in the supposed epidemic. In fact, the windshields were previously damaged, but the damage went unnoticed until people checked their windshields as the delusion spread.

Paranormal beliefs

One factor in the appeal of alleged psychic readings is that listeners apply a confirmation bias which fits the psychic's statements to their own lives. By making a large number of ambiguous statements in each sitting, the psychic gives the client more opportunities to find a match. This is one of the techniques of cold reading, with which a psychic can deliver a subjectively impressive reading without any prior information about the client. Investigator James Randi compared the transcript of a reading to the client's report of what the psychic had said, and found that the client showed a strong selective recall of the "hits".

As a striking illustration of confirmation bias in the real world, Nickerson mentions numerological pyramidology: the practice of finding meaning in the proportions of the Egyptian pyramids. There are many different length measurements that can be made of, for example, the Great Pyramid of Giza and many ways to combine or manipulate them. Hence it is almost inevitable that people who look at these numbers selectively will find superficially impressive correspondences, for example with the dimensions of the Earth.

Recruitment and selection

Unconscious cognitive bias (including confirmation bias) in job recruitment can affect hiring decisions and can potentially prohibit a diverse and inclusive workplace. There are a variety of unconscious biases that can affect recruitment decisions, and confirmation bias is one of the major ones, especially during the interview stage. The interviewer may select a candidate that confirms their own beliefs, even though other candidates are equally or better qualified.

Associated effects and outcomes

Polarization of opinion

Main article: Attitude polarization

When people with opposing views interpret new information in a biased way, their views can move even further apart. This is called "attitude polarization". The effect was demonstrated by an experiment that involved drawing a series of red and black balls from one of two concealed "bingo baskets". Participants knew that one basket contained 60 percent black and 40 percent red balls; the other, 40 percent black and 60 percent red. The experimenters looked at what happened when balls of alternating color were drawn in turn, a sequence that does not favor either basket. After each ball was drawn, participants in one group were asked to state out loud their judgments of the probability that the balls were being drawn from one or the other basket. These participants tended to grow more confident with each successive draw—whether they initially thought the basket with 60 percent black balls or the one with 60 percent red balls was the more likely source, their estimate of the probability increased. Another group of participants were asked to state probability estimates only at the end of a sequence of drawn balls, rather than after each ball. They did not show the polarization effect, suggesting that it does not necessarily occur when people simply hold opposing positions, but rather when they openly commit to them.

A less abstract study was the Stanford biased interpretation experiment, in which participants with strong opinions about the death penalty read about mixed experimental evidence. Twenty-three percent of the participants reported that their views had become more extreme, and this self-reported shift correlated strongly with their initial attitudes. In later experiments, participants also reported their opinions becoming more extreme in response to ambiguous information. However, comparisons of their attitudes before and after the new evidence showed no significant change, suggesting that the self-reported changes might not be real. Based on these experiments, Deanna Kuhn and Joseph Lao concluded that polarization is a real phenomenon but far from inevitable, only happening in a small minority of cases, and it was prompted not only by considering mixed evidence, but by merely thinking about the topic.

Charles Taber and Milton Lodge argued that the Stanford team's result had been hard to replicate because the arguments used in later experiments were too abstract or confusing to evoke an emotional response. The Taber and Lodge study used the emotionally charged topics of gun control and affirmative action. They measured the attitudes of their participants towards these issues before and after reading arguments on each side of the debate. Two groups of participants showed attitude polarization: those with strong prior opinions and those who were politically knowledgeable. In part of this study, participants chose which information sources to read, from a list prepared by the experimenters. For example, they could read arguments on gun control from the National Rifle Association of America and the Brady Anti-Handgun Coalition. Even when instructed to be even-handed, participants were more likely to read arguments that supported their existing attitudes than arguments that did not. This biased search for information correlated well with the polarization effect.

The backfire effect is a name for the finding that given evidence against their beliefs, people can reject the evidence and believe even more strongly. The phrase was coined by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler in 2010. However, subsequent research has since failed to replicate findings supporting the backfire effect. One study conducted out of the Ohio State University and George Washington University studied 10,100 participants with 52 different issues expected to trigger a backfire effect. While the findings did conclude that individuals are reluctant to embrace facts that contradict their already held ideology, no cases of backfire were detected. The backfire effect has since been noted to be a rare phenomenon rather than a common occurrence (compare the boomerang effect).

Persistence of discredited beliefs

Main article: Belief perseverance

See also: Cognitive dissonance and Monty Hall problem

Beliefs can survive potent logical or empirical challenges. They can survive and even be bolstered by evidence that most uncommitted observers would agree logically demands some weakening of such beliefs. They can even survive the total destruction of their original evidential bases.

—Lee Ross and Craig Anderson

Confirmation biases provide one plausible explanation for the persistence of beliefs when the initial evidence for them is removed or when they have been sharply contradicted. This belief perseverance effect has been first demonstrated experimentally by Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter. These psychologists spent time with a cult whose members were convinced that the world would end on 21 December 1954. After the prediction failed, most believers still clung to their faith. Their book describing this research is aptly named When Prophecy Fails.

The term belief perseverance, however, was coined in a series of experiments using what is called the "debriefing paradigm": participants read fake evidence for a hypothesis, their attitude change is measured, then the fakery is exposed in detail. Their attitudes are then measured once more to see if their belief returns to its previous level.

A common finding is that at least some of the initial belief remains even after a full debriefing. In one experiment, participants had to distinguish between real and fake suicide notes. The feedback was random: some were told they had done well while others were told they had performed badly. Even after being fully debriefed, participants were still influenced by the feedback. They still thought they were better or worse than average at that kind of task, depending on what they had initially been told.

In another study, participants read job performance ratings of two firefighters, along with their responses to a risk aversion test. This fictional data was arranged to show either a negative or positive association: some participants were told that a risk-taking firefighter did better, while others were told they did less well than a risk-averse colleague. Even if these two case studies were true, they would have been scientifically poor evidence for a conclusion about firefighters in general. However, the participants found them subjectively persuasive. When the case studies were shown to be fictional, participants' belief in a link diminished, but around half of the original effect remained. Follow-up interviews established that the participants had understood the debriefing and taken it seriously. Participants seemed to trust the debriefing, but regarded the discredited information as irrelevant to their personal belief.

The continued influence effect is the tendency for misinformation to continue to influence memory and reasoning about an event, despite the misinformation having been retracted or corrected. This occurs even when the individual believes the correction.

Preference for early information

Experiments have shown that information is weighted more strongly when it appears early in a series, even when the order is unimportant. For example, people form a more positive impression of someone described as "intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, envious" than when they are given the same words in reverse order. This irrational primacy effect is independent of the primacy effect in memory in which the earlier items in a series leave a stronger memory trace. Biased interpretation offers an explanation for this effect: seeing the initial evidence, people form a working hypothesis that affects how they interpret the rest of the information.

One demonstration of irrational primacy used colored chips supposedly drawn from two urns. Participants were told the color distributions of the urns, and had to estimate the probability of a chip being drawn from one of them. In fact, the colors appeared in a prearranged order. The first thirty draws favored one urn and the next thirty favored the other. The series as a whole was neutral, so rationally, the two urns were equally likely. However, after sixty draws, participants favored the urn suggested by the initial thirty.

Another experiment involved a slide show of a single object, seen as just a blur at first and in slightly better focus with each succeeding slide. After each slide, participants had to state their best guess of what the object was. Participants whose early guesses were wrong persisted with those guesses, even when the picture was sufficiently in focus that the object was readily recognizable to other people.

Illusory association between events

Main article: Illusory correlation

Illusory correlation is the tendency to see non-existent correlations in a set of data. This tendency was first demonstrated in a series of experiments in the late 1960s. In one experiment, participants read a set of psychiatric case studies, including responses to the Rorschach inkblot test. The participants reported that the homosexual men in the set were more likely to report seeing buttocks, anuses or sexually ambiguous figures in the inkblots. In fact the fictional case studies had been constructed so that the homosexual men were no more likely to report this imagery or, in one version of the experiment, were less likely to report it than heterosexual men. In a survey, a group of experienced psychoanalysts reported the same set of illusory associations with homosexuality.

Another study recorded the symptoms experienced by arthritic patients, along with weather conditions over a 15-month period. Nearly all the patients reported that their pains were correlated with weather conditions, although the real correlation was zero.

Example

Days	Rain	No rain
Arthritis	14	6
No arthritis	7	2

This effect is a kind of biased interpretation, in that objectively neutral or unfavorable evidence is interpreted to support existing beliefs. It is also related to biases in hypothesis-testing behavior. In judging whether two events, such as illness and bad weather, are correlated, people rely heavily on the number of positive-positive cases: in this example, instances of both pain and bad weather. They pay relatively little attention to the other kinds of observation (of no pain or good weather). This parallels the reliance on positive tests in hypothesis testing. It may also reflect selective recall, in that people may have a sense that two events are correlated because it is easier to recall times when they happened together.