GRE只是一切的开始

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ZAN

lingli_xiaoaiUID：172506

前几天在wikipedia上看到的当日主题文章比较有趣

主题是confirmation bias
阐述了大家都经常提到过的，人比较容易接受，和自己以前观点相符合的信息，而不是相反。
看完以后觉得这年头要靠自己的头脑，分析信息，做出一个unbiased 结论几乎不可能了。。

Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a tendency for researchers and other people to favor information that confirms their preconception or hypothesis whether or not it is true.[Note 1][1] As a result, people gather evidence and recall information from memory selectively, and interpret it in a biased way. The biases appear in particular for emotionally significant issues and for established beliefs. For example, in reading about gun control, people usually prefer sources that affirm their existing attitudes. They also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and/or recall have been invoked to explain attitude polarization  (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a stronger weighting for data encountered early in an arbitrary series) and illusory correlation (in which people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).

A series of experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased towards confirming their existing beliefs. Later work explained these results in terms of a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. In combination with other effects, this strategy can bias the conclusions that are reached. 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.

Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Hence they can lead to disastrous decisions, especially in organizational, military, political and social contexts.

Confirmation biases are effects in information processing, distinct from the behavioral confirmation effect, also called "self-fulfilling prophecy", in which people behave so as to make their expectations come true.[2] Some psychologists use "confirmation bias" to refer to any way in which people avoid rejecting a belief, whether in searching for evidence, interpreting it, or recalling it from memory. Others restrict the term to selective collection of evidence.[3][Note 2]

Explanations

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.[62] For example, people may judge the reliability of evidence by using the availability heuristic, i.e. how readily a particular idea comes to mind.[63] 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.[64] 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.[11][65]

Motivational explanations involve an effect of desire on belief, sometimes called "wishful thinking".[66][67] It is known that people prefer pleasant thoughts over unpleasant ones in a number of ways: this is called the "Pollyanna principle".[68] Applied to arguments or sources of evidence, this could explain why desired conclusions are more likely to be believed true.[66] 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.[69][70] 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.[66] 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.[71]

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.[72] 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.[73] 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.[74] When someone gives an initial impression of being introverted or extraverted, questions that match that impression come across as more empathic.[75] 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.[75]


Consequences

In finance

Confirmation bias can lead investors to be overconfident, ignoring evidence that their strategies will lose money.[4][76] 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.[77] To combat the effect of confirmation bias, investors can try to adopt a contrary viewpoint "for the sake of argument".[78] One such technique involves imagining that their investments have collapsed and asking why this might happen.[4]

In physical and mental health

Raymond Nickerson, a psychologist, blames confirmation bias for the ineffective medical procedures that were used for centuries before the arrival of scientific medicine.[79] 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.[79] 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.[80][81][82]

Cognitive therapy was developed by Aaron T. Beck in the early 1960s and has become a popular approach.[83] According to Beck, biased information processing is a factor in depression.[84] His approach teaches people to treat evidence impartially, rather than selectively reinforcing negative outlooks.[46] Phobias and hypochondria have also been shown to involve confirmation bias for threatening information.[85]
[edit] In politics and law

Nickerson argues that reasoning in judicial and political contexts is sometimes subconsciously biased, favoring conclusions that judges, juries or governments have already committed to.[86] 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.[87][88]

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.[89] 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 US Admiral Husband E. Kimmel showed confirmation bias when playing down the first signs of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.[56][90]

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—specifically, their inability to make use of new information that contradicted their existing theories.[91]
[edit] In the paranormal

One factor in the appeal of psychic "readings" is that listeners apply a confirmation bias which fits the psychic's statements to their own lives.[92] 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.[92] 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".[93]

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.[94] 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.[94]

In scientific procedure

A distinguishing feature of scientific thinking is the search for falsifying as well as confirming evidence.[95] However, many times in the history of science, scientists have resisted new discoveries by selectively interpreting or ignoring unfavorable data.[95] In the context of scientific research, confirmation biases can sustain theories or research programs in the face of inadequate or even contradictory evidence;[56][96] the field of parapsychology has been particularly affected.[97] 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 avoid bias.[98] Experimental designs involving randomization and double blind trials, along with the social process of peer review, mitigate the effect of individual scientists' bias.[98][99]

In self-image

Social psychologists have identified two processes in the way people seek or interpret information about themselves that are served by confirmation biases: self-verification, the drive to reinforce the existing self-image, and self-enhancement, the tendency to seek positive feedback.[100] 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.[101][102][103] They reduce the impact of such information by interpreting it as unreliable.[101][104][105] Similar experiments have found a preference for positive feedback, and the people who give it, over negative feedback.[100]

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看完了，有趣。不过有几个单词不认识，混乱猜了下。。。。-_-

ppjoyceUID：2623631

支持支持
大家都+U

doraliuUID：2842061

小哀你太伟大了。。。。。。。更加坚定了我努力的决心，我可以很安稳很安稳，不过想到如果未来的三十年我都这样安稳。。。。就让人不安了，生活还是要有经历，加油！！！

doraliuUID：2842061

people need to have some sense of how societies function simply to run their own lives


小哀姐，这句话需要论证么？

lingli_xiaoaiUID：172506

people need to have some sense of how societies function simply to run their own lives


小哀姐，这句话需要论证么？
doraliu 发表于 2010-7-26 12:04

当然需要了。。凡事statement都需要论证
除非你说，我每个月只有200块收入，但是吃饭就要用199，所以我很穷。
这句话不用论证，stands on its own。。。
但是你刚才那句。。还是要论证的。。不然别人不知道你说得是啥意思。。

大雷雨UID：2619067

太感谢了

LRXSSUID：2695903

顶起来~~~~好东西 啊

rjj21664264UID：3004467

对于过两天就要考新G的我来说，表示羡慕和遗憾，之前一直没有好好利用这个论坛；
现在的状况是离开学校已经一年，工作了一年，脱产准备了2个月的G，一直以来都是一个人在复习，感觉很孤单，很迷茫，没复习好，这几天临近考试又很痛苦，每天失眠:mad:
Who can help me

oncoUID：3114426

惊现小哀版主~~

先顶再看啊！

FantelUID：2969135

考前来感受下老老斑竹的气场。