Test Your Thinking: Spot Confirmation Bias and Reason More Fairly

Q1. Confirmation bias is best described as which pattern when you already hold a belief?
- Seeking, interpreting, favouring, and remembering information that supports the belief while discounting challenges
- Treating every viewpoint as equally credible
- Changing your belief whenever you encounter any new information
- Avoiding all sources that express an opinion
Answer: Seeking, interpreting, favouring, and remembering information that supports the belief while discounting challenges. This pattern can occur during information search, evidence interpretation, memory, and decisions about how much weight evidence deserves.
Q2. In the Wason 2-4-6 number-rule task, a participant thinks the hidden rule is ‘ascending even numbers.’ Which choice best demonstrates confirmation-seeking behavior rather than an attempt to test the hypothesis fairly?
- Offering only triples that fit the current guess, such as 10-12-14
- Offering a triple that could show the current guess is wrong
- Asking the experimenter to reveal the hidden rule immediately
- Refusing to propose any number triple
Answer: Offering only triples that fit the current guess, such as 10-12-14. Researchers examine whether participants test cases consistent with their guess instead of trying cases that might falsify it.
Q3. You are evaluating a claim and notice that you are searching only for articles that agree with you. Which action is the strongest debiasing step?
- Ask what evidence would prove you wrong and actively search for it
- Ignore all evidence until you feel completely neutral
- Give supportive sources more weight because they agree with you
- Stop considering alternative explanations
Answer: Ask what evidence would prove you wrong and actively search for it. This makes disconfirming evidence and alternative explanations part of the search instead of looking only for confirmation.
Q4. Two sources are equally informative, but one supports your preferred conclusion and the other challenges it. What is the fairest way to evaluate them?
- Apply the same standards to both, including quality, credibility, limitations, and strength of evidence
- Scrutinise the challenging source more harshly because it conflicts with your view
- Accept the supportive source without checking its methods
- Choose whichever source is more emotionally reassuring
Answer: Apply the same standards to both, including quality, credibility, limitations, and strength of evidence. Judging evidence by agreement can make contradictory information seem weaker than it is.
Q5. A researcher wants to reduce the temptation to change methods after seeing results. Which safeguard is supported by the findings?
- State hypotheses and analysis plans in advance and blind data coding where appropriate
- Choose the analysis that gives the preferred result after reviewing the data
- Record only evidence that supports the original hypothesis
- Avoid documenting which methods were used
Answer: State hypotheses and analysis plans in advance and blind data coding where appropriate. These procedures can reduce the temptation to shift methods after the results are known.

Test Your Thinking: Spot Confirmation Bias and Reason More Fairly

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