Confirmation bias seems to be the most dangerous of social cognition biases, simply put, confirmation bias is the tendency to search for information that will prove a preconceived belief and overlooking information that does not conform to the presumption. Carroll defines confirmation bias as " a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and to look for what confirms one's beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts one's beliefs ("The Skeptic's Dictionary,"" 2002)."" This manner of thinking could lead to other cognition biases such as belief perseverance and overconfidence bias, to name just a couple. Moreover, confirmation bias can trap a person to believing that he/she is right just because the person never even tried to disprove his/her hypothesis. Becoming accustomed to this method of thinking may lead to a lifetime of ignorance, now isn't that just poor?.
PROBLEM: Do people display confirmation bias in choosing a set of questions that will possibly give information verifying their beliefs instead of choosing a set that could disprove their suspicions?.
STUDY I:.
METHOD: Participants were 44 UP Diliman students, mostly and preferably psychology majors found around the PHAn area during the time of the experiment.
The stimulus materials (see Appendix A) were two variations of a form describing a situation, that if the participant was a clinical psychologist about to conduct an interview with a new client whom he/she suspects to be introverted/extraverted (depending on the questionnaire), then which of the sets of questions that followed would they use for the interview. The three sets of questions were one that determined introversion (Set A), one that gauged extraversion (Set B) and a third set of mixed questions measuring both introversion and extraversion (Set C). The idea behind this is that if the participant displayed confirmation bias, then he/she would choose the set of questions that corresponds to their suspicion: the set of questions for introversion if the participant "suspected- that their "client- was an introvert, for example.
