Investigating the ‘Belief Bias’ Effect in Human Reasoning

Regardless of whether or not a person may know the facts behind a situation, predisposition trumps knowledge learned later on; just as instinct trumps what has been taught. It is human nature to believe in what one thinks is correct, even if there are facts that prove otherwise and one will go to the necessary lengths to prove themselves so. In Kolbert’s article, Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds, various studies are put into use to explain this theory.

In a 2011 Mother Jones article, “The Science of Why We Don’t Believe in Science,” Chris Mooney, liberal author and journalist for the Washington Post, argues that people who have strong beliefs and value systems have difficulty being objective because their emotions allow them to reject or twist evidence they receive from observed facts and science. To support his claim, he provides both examples and scientific research showing that people can deny science and personally observed facts. The main examples he discusses are how people deny climate change, evolution, and the need for vaccinations for serious childhood diseases such as measles.

This theory states that individuals tend to believe certain things or think a certain way because their point of view has

The belief-bias effect is when people make judgments based on prior beliefs and general knowledge, rather than on the rules of logic. For example, when a student takes a history test and answers short-answer questions based on their prior beliefs and general knowledge about the time period, rather than thinking about the course material’s relation to the test. To maximize people’s abilities to effectively reason or make decisions, students should be taught about the belief-bias effect, so that they make fewer errors when trying to answer questions.

In the documentary “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero,” a number of people were interviewed about how their religious beliefs or non beliefs, were challenged since the events of September 11th. The interviews with priests, rabbis, family members of victims, survivors, lay people, atheists and agnostics, this documentary explores how Americans’ spiritual lives may have changed since the event. When a tragic event happens, people would either grow closer to god or outgrow god. To those people who do not believe in a god, these actions will just prove their beliefs. In the beginning of the film, people immediately started to question God. Some of them started to question why would a god so mighty approve this kind of actions. Dr. Michael Brescia, who is a physician who saw pictures of people jumping off the building, "I wonder how many of them thought if there was a God. And if there was a God, why me? Why this? And where am I going to go?” This kind of questions always come up when something catastrophic happens. Others, however, did not ask any questions and just accepted what has happened. Kim Coleman, who lost her daughter said, “God knows something I don’t, God knows best and knows better than we do.” There were also a couple of people who were not so sure what to think of god anymore. Rev. Joseph Griesedieck, a priest who volunteered at Ground Zero said, “the face of God was a blank slate for me. God couldn't be counted on in the way that I thought God could be

The information is not presented accurately in the essay. Elbow explains this situation in a way that presents the believing game to only his advantage. The scenario could be less biased if Elbow had presented more than just one example of how people experience the believing game in real life. The essay is lacking any other accounts other than the author himself.

William K. Clifford, a great mathematician and philosopher of the 1877 authored the essay The Ethics of Belief. In this famous essay he wrote about how it is always wrong to believe anything that does not have concrete evidence. Although people always have different opinions, beliefs based on bad or incomplete evidence are always wrong no matter what. I believe what Clifford says in this essay about bad evidence because when people believe things that are not true it could negatively affect another person’s life. Clifford gives two examples one of a boat and one about gossip, which helps demonstrate how not having concrete evidence to support one’s statements can negatively impact people around them.

Confirmation bias is something that every person is susceptible to, unless you know that you’re doing it. Confirmation bias is our tendency to seek out information that we already believe to be true. This affects how you interpret information, how you seek information, and also how you remember things. When you look at the world around you, it is the conformation bias in your head that is telling you certain things to pay attention to more than others. Your brain tends to seek out evidence that confirms your beliefs about something. You often do this because you do not want to be wrong about something and will do anything

The focus of the book Don't Believe Everything You Think by Thomas Kida covers a large scope of reasoning methods and universal mistakes made while using those methods to reason on several issues whether it be serious or an everyday situation. Kida utilizes six focal points in the thought processes of humans in order to explain our faulty reasoning. These focal points were hence coined "The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking." In this book, Kida himself didn't conduct any research for this subject matter, instead he made us of a collection of past researchers with their findings and philosophers in order to strongly oppose and demean the six basic mistakes with already existing and well accepted evidence.

For the source, I found a research by Jochen Musch and Katja Ehrenberg called “Probability Misjudgment, Cognitive Ability, and Belief

In his lecture, “The Will to Believe,” William James addresses how one adopts a belief. There is a hypothesis and an option, where you choose between two live hypotheses. An option has the characteristics to be live or dead, forced or avoidable, and momentous or trivial. In his thesis, James argues how “our passional nature” must make our decisions about our beliefs when they cannot be certainly determined on “intellectual grounds,” however, this is not the case, we can always make the decision based on intellectual grounds. One can use Bayesian probability to gain some grasp of the situation and eventually to make a decision.

We are apt to think we remember a situation better than we actually do, leading to suggestion and distorting the actual truth unintentionally. For this reason, judges on a court case do not rely solely on evidence from eyewitness testimony because even though one may appear to be telling the truth, what they are actually saying can be false. Going hand in hand with memory is confidence. A dose of confidence appears to make a person sound brighter on the topic at hand and even consents others with confidence that what they are saying is correct and trusting. However, Chabris and Simons warn us that confidence should not be the determiner of deciding who is more reliable. A person who displays more confidence in general over another person cannot be perceived as smarter, for this an illusion people quite often make when determining what side to be on. Another issue with this is the explanation The Invisible Gorilla gives of knowledge and how we generally think we know more than we actually do. We tend to initiate the effects of experiences from a cause not related at all, jumping to conclusions, and believing there are easier ways to make ourselves smarter by projecting potential. Our memory, confidence, and knowledge as well as cause and potential all deceive us on everyday occasions convincing us to believe far more than the truth on a regular

For Kathryn Schulz description in the reading “Evidence” she presents a vivid viewpoint over inductive inclinations or inductive thinking. Inductive thinking may be a method for speculation that structures our feelings as stated by those path we were brought up or those society we are starting with (Schulz).

Confirmation bias is a tendency of people to prefer information that reinforces a thought or believe that they have. People demonstrate this bias when they retain information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotional issues and for deeply rooted beliefs. (Science Daily)

So with the idea of finding what influence a positive false belief had on people the researchers conducted the experiment. Also this finding of false positive belief would have a positive influence in a person behavior would have both theoretical and practical significance. It would demonstrate that it is possible to plant false positive memories in people and also it could conceivably aid in clinical treatment of certain disease (e.g. generalized anxiety phobia).