Confirmation Bias and Lessons from History
Have you heard of the term, “ confirmation bias ”? The original experiment that led to this term would help understand: 1) At the outset, you are told that a certain rule applies to triplets of numbers in a series. The triplet (2, 4, 6) fits that rule. 2) To find out if you figured out the rule, you have to come up with another triplet and are allowed to ask if that triplet fits the rule or not. 3) There is no limit on how many questions you can ask. Sounds simple enough, right? Does (4, 6, 8) fit? Yes. Does (24, 26, 28) fit? Yes. Is the rule “any 3 successive even numbers”? Wrong! Does (6, 10, 14) fit? Yes. Does (10, 22, 34) fit? Yes. Is the rule “the middle number is the average of the first and third”? Wrong again! The rule is proving surprisingly difficult to figure out, isn’t it? The correct answer was simply “any ascending series”! Why was that so hard? Because we humans tend to loo...