[SystemSafety] Fwd: Contextualizing & Confirmation Bias

Derek M Jones derek at knosof.co.uk
Wed Feb 5 22:02:20 CET 2014


Peter,

Found a link to the Millikan lab book pictures:
http://algol.fis.uc.pt/forum/millikan.pdf
I gave Millikan as an example because of his belief
about what the value of the charge should, not that a
smallest unit of charge existed.

One of the postgrads in the electronics lab once told
me, an undergraduate at the time, that they sometimes
switched on the large magnetic field generator in the
corner before students started running experiments.  It seems
that this did not prevent the students reporting the
expected results (which should have been completely distorted
by the field generator).

> The term "confirmation bias" originally refers to the following phenomenon. (1) You believe A. (2)
> You act as if A. (3) You experience the world as if A is true. (4) You end up believing A more than
> you did at the beginning simply because of that.

What about Bertrand Russell's turkeys that get fed everyday and
infer “I am always fed at 9 a.m.”.  Come Christmas eve all but one
suddenly find out they guilty of confirmation bias.

Would you say that all the Turkeys with the exception of the one
pardoned by the President are guilty of confirmation bias?

The cognitive psychology books sitting on my shelf appear to use
conformation bias in the Bertrand Russell Turkey sense.

However, the "MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences"
says (much to my surprise):
"That is, subjects will conduct an experiment
that will generate a result that is predicted by their hypothesis.
This is known as confirmation bias"

Just found it online:
http://www.ru.lv/~peter/zinatne/ebooks/MIT.Encyclopedia.of.the.Cognitive.Sciences.pdf
but I would recommend a hardcopy for the imposing presence it radiates
from ones bookshelf.

-- 
Derek M. Jones                  tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667
Knowledge Software Ltd          blog:shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com
Software analysis               http://www.knosof.co.uk


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