Woman: Vaccines cause autism.
Google: Well, I have one million results that say they don't... and one result that says they do.
Woman: [picks the latter result] I... knew it!
Google: [screaming] Just because I have it doesn't mean it's TRUE!
Google: Well, I have one million results that say they don't... and one result that says they do.
Woman: [picks the latter result] I... knew it!
Google: [screaming] Just because I have it doesn't mean it's TRUE!
Confirmation Bias is a cognitive bias
which causes people to lend extra weight to information and arguments that confirm their own beliefs while disregarding or downplaying evidence that disputes them. This bias comes in several forms:
- Seeking evidence for a belief one already holds, or eagerly accepting it, while disregarding or downplaying contradictory evidence. Often known by the ironic name "Proof by Selected Instances".
- Interpreting ambiguous information with a focus on how it favors one's own beliefs.
- Rationalizing contradictory evidence in a way that still affirms one's own beliefs.
This phenomenon isn't limited to positive beliefs, as people can be just as prone to only accepting evidence against a position they hate.
Confirmation Bias doesn't mean everyone with a given viewpoint will like something because it follows that view. Some may criticize it for not doing a good enough job of persuading the undecided or those with the opposite view. Contrast Don't Shoot the Message, which is about disliking a work because of its style even if one may agree with its message.
Frequently results in Logical Fallacies such as No True Scotsman, Hitler Ate Sugar, and Moving the Goalposts. A form of Selective Obliviousness; see also Opinion Myopia. Taken to extremes, this way of thinking will result in a Captain Oblivious.
In-Universe Examples Only please!
Examples:
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Advertising
- Those Mac vs. PC ads that depend entirely on Ad Hominem and misconceptions to sell their points to the audience, which in most cases either already agrees, disagrees, and is already aware of what is untrue about the ads, Took A Third Option, or is very easily Distracted by the Shiny, which admittedly usually tends to work in Apple's favor.
- The older ads weren't quite as preachy. The newer ones, though... well, they really rely on Viewers Are Morons and what people already hate about Windows (one commercial featured all the PC's walking away and just Justin Long staying after a potential user asked for a computer that didn't have any error messages or other problems).
- These actually managed to make Microsoft Windows look like a put-upon underdog. As has been pointed out many times, which of these two men would you hire if they were competing for a job?
- The T-Mobile parody commercials weren't much better... though T-Mobile was lampooning Apple iPhone, which was at the time an AT&T exclusive.
- The UK versions of the ads are even worse. The Mac and PC are played by Robert Webb and David Mitchell, respectively. They play basically the same characters as they do in Peep Show, where Webb's character is stupid, lazy, and unreliable, and Mitchell is hard-working and serious-to-a-fault. Which qualities would you rather have on your computer?
- Samsung has launched a similar ad campaign for their Android mobile devices, portraying Apple users as morons. And they actually directly attack the same exact potential customers they'd do well to convert. Because we all know how well the Mac vs. PC ads worked. Yup, they're even copying Apple's failures. At this rate, soon they'll be rolling out their own maps app that tells you to drive over a lake, through your local library, and onto an airport runway.
- Microsoft's smartphone ads made it seem like phones that relied on apps were invariably hard to use, meaning you spent most of your time looking down at your phone and less time interacting with people. The Microsoft phone, however, had everything you needed on the main screen, meaning you spent less time looking down at it. You actually had to spend more time with it because you kept having to scroll, as opposed to just tapping an app.
Comedy
- Richard Pryor spots 'Clapter' and calls it out in Live On the Sunset Strip when his mention of Arizona State Penitentiary gets applause. "What? You're applauding that? Arizona State Penitentiary real popular?!"
- Tim Minchin invokes and mocks this in his song "Thank You God". It starts with Tim telling a story of an Australian man named Sam, who prayed to God to cure his mother's eyesight, and her eyesight improved. Though Tim goes into an apparently sincere apology to God, it quickly turns into a sarcastic takedown of Sam's brand of "miracle" story as being biased towards people who are prone to believing it. Tim also spends part of the same song citing the fact that many people who tell such stories are pretty well-off as it is, since Sam's mother had a relatively benign condition that was cured quite easily.
Comic Books
- Knights of the Old Republic: Lampshaded by Marn, who calls out the Jedi Covenant for Dramatically Missing the Point of the vision of the future that kicked off the plot because it didn't line up with their extreme fundamentalist view of the Force and what it meant to be a Jedi; it's painfully obvious the Force was warning them of what would happen if they continued down their path (i.e., they would all die and a powerful Sith Lord would arise), but the Covenant instead chose to interpret it as a warning of what would happen if they didn't become more extreme, and in doing so, they seal their fates.
That's the problem with you people and your prophecies — when something doesn't fit, you force it.
Fan Works
- Catarina Claes MUST DIE!: Henrietta's major flaw, besides her Catarina-specific sadism. Henrietta is so emotionally fixated on Catarina's suffering for catharsis that she can't imagine a world where she isn't right to want Catarina to suffer. As such, she does everything she can to validate her sadism towards Catarina by only acknowledging some parts of events she witnesses and not others and even seemingly rewriting events to herself to comform to her belief that Catarina is evil and deserves to suffer.
- The Dark Below: Aizawa believes Inko is abusing Izuku and takes everything she does as confirmation, including outrage and fury at the very notion she'd ever harm her son. Recovery Girl calls him out on foolishly confronting her rather than following regulations.
- Equestria: A History Revealed: This is the most prevalent bias that the narrator Loose Change is guilty of. Loose Change holds the belief that everything that happens in history ties into a vast conspiracy, with Princess Celestia as the evil mastermind of it all. This is despite mountains of evidence to the contrary showing that Celestia is actually a benevolent ruler, and Loose Change goes out of her way to ignore information that contradicts her claims. The few times that Loose Change calls the rest of the "idiot historians" correct is only when they match her beliefs. Loose Change's terrible reasoning skills in her essay, however, are Played for Laughs, as the fic's author intentionally made Loose Change out to be an Unreliable Narrator.
- Discussed in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: To make Hermione a better researcher, Harry puts her through the "2-4-6 task", an experiment created by Peter Wason, the real-life psychologist who coined the term "Confirmation Bias": Harry writes down and folds up a "rule" that certain triplets of numbers follow and tasks Hermione with figuring out what it is. Hermione can say as many triplets of numbers as she likes and Harry will say "Yes" or "No" depending on if they follow the rule or not. As a starting point, Harry says that the triplets "2, 4, 6" follows the rule. Hermione tests the triplets "4, 6, 8", "10, 12, 14", "1, 3, 5", and "-3, -1, 1" and is told "Yes" for all of them. Hermione guesses that the rule is that each number is increased by two. Harry doesn't answer and points out that less than 20% of people can guess the correct answer. Hermione then tests "2, 5, 8" and "10, 20, 30" and also gets yes for both, leading her to revise her answer to "each number must increase the same amount each time". Harry gives her the paper, and to her shock, the actual rule is "Three real numbers in increasing order, lowest to highest". Harry then points out that Hermione had only come up with triplets that would confirm the hypothesis she already had in her mind and was content to end the experiment without getting a single "No" response, leading her to come up with a result much more specific than the real one.
- Confirmation bias becomes a plot point in Father Goose and the Black Knight (a Buffy the Vampire Slayer / Law & Order: Special Victims Unit crossover fanfic). Detective Stabler is so convinced that the only reason why an adult man like Xander Harris would be associated with a school for teenage girls is that he (Xander) is a pedophile. Of course, the truth is that the girls are all Slayers-in-Training, and Xander is one of their three teachers (the other two being a Watcher and Faith).
- A Certain Droll Hivemind: Sometimes, Misaka-11111 will claim that "nearly everyone I know" agrees with her on a certain point; for example, her clothes are not weird and have no trouble fitting, because nearly everyone she knows finds Tokiwadai medium-size girls uniform fine casual wear. She deliberately ignores the blatant bias of asking for opinions from ten thousand fellow identical clones. She mostly does this when she's especially annoyed at people asking her to act normal.
- My Hero Pokedamia: While watching the Sports Festival, Sir Nighteye keeps watch of everything Izuku does so he can twist it to fit his preconceived idea that Izuku isn't All Might's ideal successor.
- Reignfall: May justifies killing Amber by reasoning that, since she works for Ozpin, she can't be as innocent as she seems, so when Amber tries to kill an incapacitated Emerald, May takes it as proof of Amber's casual cruelty. From the reader's perspective, Amber killing one of the assassins who just tried to kill her is a perfectly reasonable reaction.
Films — Live-Action
- Blindspotting: Discussed by Collin and Val while he's helping her study for her psychology class. The way bias warps our perception, causing two people to see the same events completely differently, is a central theme of the film.
- My Cousin Vinny: The Police investigating the shooting hear one of their suspects say "I shot the clerk?" and interpret it not as a question, but as a statement.
- The Usual Suspects: Confirmation bias is discussed by Verbal Kint, who is interrogated by Inspector Kujan at a police investigation. Later, the audience will discover that Verbal not only discussed it, but exploited it.
Verbal: To a cop, the explanation is never that complicated. It's always simple. There's no mystery to the street, no arch criminal behind it all. If you got a dead body and you think his brother did it, you're gonna find out you're right.
Literature
- Behind the Sandrat Hoax: Dr. Bancroff firmly refuses to believe that sandrats survive without water or that eating one can prevent dehydration. While conducting tests that support this claim, he deprives captive sandrats of their regular food, which, combined with their digestive system, lets the sandrats go without water. He spends the next four years citing this test while denying that people are surviving in the desert because of sandrats despite their stories offering no other explanation for how they survived. Dr. Cathcart publishes an article that derides Bancroff as an administrator with no scientific imagination and writes that "[[I]]n science, theories are based on facts, not vice-versa." Bancroff replies by firing Cathcart.
- Lorien Legacies: Five isn't treated particularly badly by a lot of the Garde, he just isn't used to their different approaches to teamwork, but he takes anything but the complete acceptance he receives from Marina and Eight to be confirmation that the Mogs were right and his own kind are awful, something they brainwashed him to believe in order to completely turn him to their side.
- Tearmoon Empire: All of Mia's followers are entirely convinced of her wisdom and virtue, so when they see her doing something that is obviously moronic they will stop and begin trying to make up an explanation for why it's actually a genius strategy. They then accept this wild guess as being the actual truth because it conforms to their assumption that Mia has some kind of basic functional plan.
- The Number of the Beast: Invoked specifically by Zeb in his backstory. Specifically, he carefully structured his Ph.D. thesis to "show" that biases held by all the members of his doctoral committee were widely held to be correct (crossed with Appeal to Obscurity, as he pulled a lot of selective quotations out of materials that hadn't been translated into English as part of his "research").
- In A Scandal In Bohemia, Sherlock Holmes warns us of the dangers of this fallacy in regards to investigation:
Holmes: It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
- In the Myth Adventures novel M.Y.T.H. Inc. Link, Skeeve is continually examining the books of the gambling club he won in a poker game, looking for evidence that the manager is skimming money off the top. One of his bodyguards points out that the problem with what he's doing is that "if you look for evidence of graft long enough, you're going to find it whether it's there or not." So he gives up the constant audits. Turns out, the manager was skimming off the top, but the point was still made.
- The Divine Comedy has Saint-Doctor Thomas Aquinas warning Dante against believing that he sees the world as perfectly as God, for his perception passes on truth "like an artist who knows his craft but has a hand that trembles." If he fails to recognize the faults of his opinions, Dante will fall into the ranks of idiot philosophers and heretics, since "affection for one’s own opinion binds, confines the mind."
- Spenser: The titular character has occasionally discussed confirmation bias regarding police investigations, noting that cops tend to go with the simplest explanation for a crime. However, he has also pointed out that the simplest explanation really is the correct one most of the time, and for the few times it isn't, the fact is that the police always have lots of cases they're trying to clear (and there's always another eleven or more about to show up), so they don't have time to do an in-depth investigation of a crime that to all appearances has been solved.
- In the introduction to his book "Outrage: The 5 Reasons O.J Simpson Got Away With Murder" Vince Bugilosi says point blank the book is for people who already believe that O.J Simpson was guilty and to confirm why.
Live-Action TV
- The word "clapter" was coined to describe the latter effect in TV — when an audience applauds a joke more than actually laughing at it. It's an accusation often leveled at the more political years of The Daily Show after Jon Stewart took the helm. (Its synonym "clappy humor" has an entry in the Urban Dictionary.)
- There are great honking buttloads of "comedians" who feed on clapter. Not surprisingly, they tend to disappear whenever the political winds shift in their favor.
- One unused stand-up bit from Seinfeld is about this. "To comedians, the truth is just bad material. The last thing you want is for people to just be thinking, "Hey, he's... right. He's a really, really accurate guy."
- This is undoubtedly one of two reasons that The O'Reilly Factor and Countdown with Keith Olbermann exist. By extension, any show (or book, or radio program, or whatever) with a severe political slant is going to fall into this at some point as the Invisible Hand pulls them in that direction. There's almost no pundit who doesn't.
- Panel shows try to avert this by having a variety of guests of different viewpoints (mainly because it would be boring to see a bunch of people sitting around agreeing on everything). Of course, there are plenty of ways to make a biased panel show (i.e. get a Fox News Liberal, stack the deck by putting aggressive "strong" debaters against less experienced ones, unevenly stack the panel on one side so everyone can gang up on the minority opinion, etc.)
- On Saturday Night Live in 2012, Seth Meyers recommended that both presidential candidates stop "telling us stories about people you met at your rally who happen to agree with your positions. That's like Bret Michaels saying, 'At my last concert, someone yelled 'Poison rules!'"
- In the Criminal Minds episode "Profiler, Profiled", Gideon and Reid discuss the fact that the detective who arrested Agent Morgan for murder already suspected Morgan of the crime before requesting an "anonymous" profile of the likely killer and then applied the profile directly to Morgan. Reid specifically points out all the parts of the profile the detective ignored because they were inaccurate when considering Agent Morgan as a suspect. Snarky fans and critics might point out that the team themselves are just as guilty of this in their own way, frequently smashing through the doors of suspects who happen to fit their often-times sketchy profiles (and occasionally rejecting suspects because they don't fit the profile, regardless of other evidence) — of course, since it's the heroes, they are almost always in the right.
- In the UK, Channel 4 has made a slew of fly-on-the-wall documentaries that look at particular groups of people that relate to very controversial topics; e.g. My Granny, The Escort, which looks at elderly prostitutes; Crazy About One Direction, which, needless to say, looks at One Direction fans; and perhaps more infamously Benefits Street, which looks at benefit claimants. What makes one hesitant to call these shows "documentaries" is that they don't present these issues in an informative manner, instead presenting a one-sided view of the people being covered. Benefits Street especially focuses primarily on people who aren't doing much with their lives outside of watching T.V., painting benefit claimants in a negative light, which has been pointed out by full-time parents and disabled people. This seems to be becoming more transparent, however, as a proposed spin-off Immigration Street was cancelled halfway through filming due to protests over possible racism-related violence.
- One episode of Bones has an anthropologist as the victim. One of his biggest customers is a man who runs a creationist museum, which purports to disprove human evolution and supports intelligent design. Sweets quickly points out that most of the fossils he purchased from the victim actually disprove the man's timeline and as such aren't anywhere to be found. Sweets outright accuses him of buying the fossils to destroy them to support his beliefs, to which he doesn't have a good answer.
Myths & Religion
- Books of Kings: When Jehosophat suggests to Ahab that they consult prophets before going into battle against Syria, Ahab summons the 400 prophets on his payroll, who enthusiastically proclaim victory for their side. When Jehosophat asks if there are any prophets of the LORD, Ahab admits there is, but doesn’t want to consult him, because “he never prophesies good concerning me, only evil.” And when (at Jehosophat's insistence) they do bring in the prophet Micaiah, he not only foretells defeat but declares that the LORD sent a lying spirit to put lies in the other prophets’ mouths. Ahab ignores Micaiah, instead locking him up, and is then killed in battle.
Podcasts
- Star Trek Khan: In "Magical Thinking" Ensign Tuvok accuses Dr. Lear of this. He tells her that it appears she doesn't want to learn what really happened, but to confirm her belief that Kirk deliberately left the Augments on a planet with an unstable neighboring planet that would explode mere months after the Augments were dropped off.
Print Media
- The Evening Standard for 2014-08-18 published a short piece about Daniel Radcliffe whose author took the opportunity to have a dig at The Casual Vacancy, quoting from a scene and then saying that it is "not erotic". As anyone who has actually read the novel would know, the scene takes place in primary school, and the participants are all five years old, so of course it isn't erotic — it isn't meant to be. (And the fact that the author of the piece considered even for a moment that the scene might be erotic is deeply suspect.)
Theatre
- Othello: Scholars have suggested for centuries that Iago's lies about Desdemona's infidelity are actually pretty flimsy; the tragedy comes from the fact that Othello is so willing to believe them.
Video Games
- Mass Effect: Reapers were created by an advanced Artificial Intelligence who became convinced that synthetic life would inevitably attack and destroy organic life, and created the Reapers as a way to supposedly "preserve" organic life in a synthetic form. The idea that organics and synthetics could co-exist peacefully (as demonstrated by EDI, the geth, and [in Mass Effect: Andromeda] SAM) never occurred to them or were considered one-off anomalies every time the situation popped up.
- With the heavy focus on rumors and conspiracy theories, Confirmation Bias plays a big part in the story for Persona 2. The perhaps most damning instance is with Maya Okamura where as rumors start to become real she thoroughly digs into her own wild beliefs to affirm them, finding whatever she can to support them while ignoring anything that says otherwise, creating a self-fulfilling and toxic spiral. This culminates in her actively trying to make certain things true just to further indulge in her bias, even if it means the end of the world.
- Persona 4, with its themes of finding the truth and Arc Words "People see what they want to see, and believe what they want to believe", naturally deals with this during its story. This is how the Investigation Team suspect the wrong person for the murders twice.
- The first time, a suspect kills a teacher and turns himself in to the police, taking credit for all the murders. Chie remembers him acting creepy towards Yukiko earlier that year (which did happen) and ties that in to a motive for kidnapping her. But Kanji and Rise were also kidnapped. Yosuke then remembers how the suspect had once ranted about biker gangs and Rise had seen him around her grandmother's tofu shop, leading them to jump to the conclusion that he must have kidnapped them too. All of this blinds them to the obvious: the current victim had a completely different cause of death to the first two, and the current suspect shows no knowledge of the TV World.
- The second time, the team is emotional over the kidnapping and supposed death of someone close to them, and has a suspect who's admitted to the kidnappings and displays an unhinged desire to "save" people. The knowledge that the killer's supernatural methods might be undetectable by the police leads them to seriously consider a Vigilante Execution. The protagonist must choose their responses very carefully to talk them out of it, by stalling long enough for them to realize their premise for suspecting this person as the killer has numerous holes.
- It hits again in the ending, and is aimed at the player as well as the cast. It's easy to assume after the killer is caught, and after fighting a giant supernatural being (with a unique boss theme) seeking to bring order to humanity, that the story is over and all loose ends are wrapped up. It isn't, and they're not.
Visual Novels
- Danganronpa: A consistent plot point in each killing game is that Monokuma believes that despair and self-preservation will overcome the players enough to kill without remorse. Of course, he doesn't count the "incentives" he gives such as threatening family members, sending out a virus that makes people insane, or making players kill themselves to ensure somebody dies on time as contributing to these outcomes.
Webcomics
- Grrl Power tackles the Wolves Always Howl at the Moon trope when it introduces a werewolf character. As he explains, wolves howl a lot, and occasionally there's a moon, but since wolves howling at the moon is such a romanticized image, people only notice when it happens.
Web Original
- The CollegeHumor sketch "If Google Was a Guy":
- In part 3, a woman searches Google (who is in the form of a regular guy) about vaccines causing autism. Google comes up with a million results that say they don't, and one source that says they do. The woman snatches the latter result with a smarmy "I knew it!"
- It happened again a few videos later, with another woman coming in and searching for "Climate change is not real." Google responds with a massive pile of letters and the retort "Climate change is real." The woman then adopted the same smarmy tone and said (while making Air Quotes) "Climate change is not real," narrowing it down once again to a single entry, which she snatched and swaggered out.
- In part 3
- Folding Ideas discussed this in his video "This Is Financial Advice", in which he discusses the Ape community, a community of mostly redditors that believes that their shares in GameStop will someday grant them a massive amount of money, enough to shift the power balance of the world economy in their favor, through a theory called MOASS. A lot of their beliefs come from Due Diligence (nicknamed "DD") that is posted and made by Apes themselves in their various communities. Dan points out that a lot of the DDs are steeped in the biases of the apes, who want to and have invested interest in holding their shares rather than selling, and are therefore intensely supportive of MOASS and disregard any evidence or argument on why it might not happen or the benefits of selling their shares before it. This contrasts with real Due Diligence that is supposed to be a thorough study on the pros and cons of purchasing an asset, and as much an argument for buying as for not buying.
- Quinton Reviews discussed this a fair bit in his "Paul Is Dead" video, focusing on how many conspiracy theorists rely on this to get evidence—the massive catalog of The Beatles material made it pretty easy for aspiring theorists to find cases of Paul McCartney being singled out or separated. In a more serious context, he pointed out a Who Shot JFK? documentary that claimed there was a man with a gun in the infamous "grassy knoll" photograph. When they reached someone who claimed to have been there and seen three men, the documentary immediately "found" two other men in the photo, whom they had never noticed before despite poring over the photo constantly. The area these men were "seen" in is small, grainy, indistinct, and dark, meaning if you wanted to, you could say pretty much anyone was there and it would be difficult to disprove.
Western Animation
- Spider-Man (1967): When Peter Parker comes in with some pictures of the Green Goblin stealing a magical tome, J. Jonah Jameson fits this evidence into his existing viewpoint:
Jameson: The thought of Spider-Man with supernatural powers makes me shiver!
Parker: But... that's the Green Goblin.
Jameson: So he got a new costume!
Real Life
- In his Youtube podcast series Afterburner, conservative American pundit Bill Whittle often falls to this kind of logic, such as when attributing Plano, TX's record homicide lows to their high gun ownership rate — and absolutely no other factors. Another example has him concluding that America's laissez-faire economic model had made the country more inventive and ingenious than 'Socialist' countries like Sweden. His compelling evidence: the clicks he needed on The Other Wiki to find entries on American and Swedish inventions.
- Tony Kushner not only admitted to but defended this in a 1997 essay, albeit with a pretty valid reason behind it:
The converted need preaching to as much as the unconverted, and will usually prove far more responsive and interested in change ... Those who are involved in the struggle to change the world need art that assists in examining the issues at hand, which are usually incredibly complex.
- Some critics have argued that the internet would result in "echo chambers" where everyone would just view news sites, blogs, and forums that didn't challenge their views. Online communities have since adopted the term "echo chamber" to refer to this phenomenon, along with other terms like "circlejerk" (which refers to a group of people masturbating together) and "hug box" (which refers to an actual device used to calm hypersensitivity). According to one study, online "echo chambers" aren't any worse than other media (since radio, TV, and print media that pander to either side do exist and always have).
- Google and other web search engines will give personalized search results, changing the order of search results based on one's web activity. The potential problems are self-evident: sites you agree with are more visited and come up higher in search results, while sites you disagree with may end up buried in the search results, even if they bring up a worthwhile point regarding a particular search. Google now has a setting to quickly switch personalized results on and off from the results page.
- The Republican National Committee, in the wake of the 2012 presidential election, admitted that many conservatives spoke only to people on their side or paid attention to news sources slanted in their favor (such as the Fox News Channel), which was likewise basing their stories only on what their own side was saying. As a result, they were convinced that Mitt Romney would be elected in a landslide, and basically let his campaign coast, confident he would win handily. Once that bubble of comfort burst, however, the results were less than pretty. Karl Rove in particular had an on-camera meltdown when Fox News called Ohionote for Barack Obama.
- Conspiracy theorists tend to cite each other rather than any reputable outlet. The anti-vaccine blogosphere (Age of Autism, Natural News) and quack "boomed" practitioners (Andrew Wakefield) they defend are good examples of this.
- A major contributor to the continued appeal of psychics and mediums. As Michael Shermer has noted, they don't tend to give out negative readings or tell people things they don't want to hear:
There was redemption for all — our loved ones forgive us for any wrongdoing; they still love us; they suffer no more; they want us to be happy. What else would he say? "Your father wants you to know that he will never forgive you for wrecking his car"? (On James Van Pragh)
- Critics argue that this is how horoscopes and, to a lesser extent, personality tests such as Myers–Briggs work. If you don't know your star sign, try looking at all twelve of them. How many fit you, and how distinctly? Now, which one is yours? It's been shown in tests that a sufficiently vague astrological reading will be identified by nearly everyone as describing them, regardless of what their actual star sign is.
- For a long time, it was believed that the circle was the most "perfect" and aesthetically pleasing shape and, therefore, planetary orbits would naturally tend to be circular. Measurements that didn't support this were dismissed as inaccurate until too much contrary evidence was piled up to ignore, and then ever-more-complex models involving small circular micro-orbits ("epicycles") around the main orbit were devised to account for the discrepancy. Finally, Johannes Kepler showed that all this silliness could be avoided by dropping the insistence on perfectly circular orbits and moving to a more elegant model of elliptical orbits.
- Ideas about the "golden ratio"note phi (or "tau" as some mathematicians, wishing to disassociate themselves from such beliefs, prefer to call it) is that the "perfect" rectangle as far as human psychology is concerned is one whose sides are in the golden ratio. One psychologist did an experiment exploring this, and claimed that the results he got "proved" the idea; but others, attempting to repeat the experiment, were able only to conclude that the ideal rectangle for most people lies somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1. When this is mentioned to phi supporters, they tend to dismiss this inconvenient fact.note
- Gamers (and gamblers) have a wide range of superstitions surrounding the Random Number God, though mostly this falls among tabletop gamers who handle the dice themselves as opposed to a computerized RNG. It's easy to remember having a hot streak one night, leading you to favor the same dice later; or a die seems "cursed" because you missed a few hits in a row in an important fight. In either case, you're most likely selectively remembering what confirms the feeling of whether you're doing well or not — if you're losing games or your character takes a pounding, you're more likely to remember the dice or cards "working against" you. Outside of tabletop and video games, gamblers have been suffering far longer under the same basic fallacies from confirmation bias and misunderstanding of things like the law of averages. This also gave rise to what's known as the Gambler's Fallacy - the belief that coins/dice/slots/cards/etc. have "memory," or that a sequence of events with a random outcome (like flipping a coin) is somehow affected by previous outcomes.
- One variant of this is called kafkatrappingnote , in reference to Franz Kafka's The Trial. It's when you accuse someone of something, and then take their denial as a Suspiciously Specific Denial that only further proves the accusation.
- People who follow the Young Earth movement—that is, who believe that God literally created the world in a week and the planet is only 6000 years old based on Biblical evidence—tend to consider all evidence to the contrary (such as fossils and artifacts carbon-dated to more than 6000 years old) as having been placed there either by God or the Devil (depending on who you ask) to "test their faith". Others claim it shows a scientific conspiracy against "Biblical truth", or the biologists'/geologists' own biases (never mind that many prominent scientists in these fields are/were themselves Christians-they switch to them being "not the right kind" if it's pointed out).
- The common belief that people can somehow sense if they are Being Watched may actually be caused by this: people tend to remember the times they thought someone was watching them, turned around, and saw someone there, but forget the times when they turned around and there was no one there.
- A particularly nasty variant happened in the Renaissance. A few scholars put forth the idea that the five-hundred-year or so period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the "high middle ages" was a time of absolute ignorance where there was almost no development of civilization and science. They dubbed it the Dark Ages. When evidence refuting this theory was discovered they not only ignored it, they destroyed it. The damage can still be seen in modern history and the popular consciousness. The Motive
- A harmless, but still telling example: there was an experiment where they testers would tell people three numbers and ask them to guess the "rule" they followed. They would start with something like 2/4/6 and, starting from that example, most participants assumed it was "even numbers increasing by two" and would ask things like if 8/10/12, 14/16/18, and so on followed it until eventually making the guess. It turns out they were wrong: the rule is really "any three numbers in increasing order". What makes this so interesting is how easy it would be for those involved to disprove their theory (e.g ask "does 5/7/9 fit?") yet not one person involved thought to do this.
- This is a major reason why, in law, eyewitness accounts are taken with a grain of salt: the Self-Serving Memory is a very real phenomenon, and it can be easy to convince a witness that they saw something when they didn't, especially if what you're saying to them "sounds about right."
- According to Devin McAuley, this is the reason behind many dance videos, .gifs, or songs that seem to "go with anything", with the classic example being Dancing Spider-Man◊: the human brain is trained to recognize patterns, and so it picks out the bits where the beat matches up, and ignores the parts where it doesn't.
- It's common to hear arguments that something isn't racist/sexist/etc. because they heard a few select people of that race/sex/etc. say they didn't think it was. Usually these people don't consider the possibility that they may be part of a minority (no pun intended), or at least that just as many people do think the thing is bigoted towards them as those who don't. This often takes the form of conservatives citing an article or a video about why [thing] isn't racist by one black commentator... who is also conservative.
- This is a major problem in cryptozoology and why it’s considered a branch of pseudoscience. Bigfoot believers, for example, will readily accept any supposed evidence that’s favorable to the existence of the cryptid ape-man and ignore if the source of said evidence is dodgy or unreliable. Case in point, when it comes to the famous Patterson-Gimlin film, believers constantly preach how “realistic” the creature in the film looks but completely ignore the fact that Roger Patterson (the man who shot the film) was a famously eccentric and crafty Con Man who was also an avid bigfoot believer who previously wrote a book that recounted and illustrated an earlier encounter by a man named William Roe, who supposedly encountered a female bigfoot with prominent mammaries, which coincidently perfectly matches Patterson’s own encounter which he caught on film.
- Confirmation bias is a big part behind the legend of The Bermuda Triangle. While there have indeed been some shipwrecks or disasters in the region, it's a region twice the size of France, directly next to the well-traveled Caribbean and Florida, and therefore accidents of that sort cropping up would be downright expected. Most actual analyses of the region say that it's no more dangerous than you'd expect a place of its size and level of traffic to be; if anything, it's relatively safe by the standards of shipping routes. Additionally, due to the legend surrounding the place, events that would simply be described as "shipwrecks", "crashes", or "accidents" anywhere else get turned into "mysterious disappearances" when they happen in the Triangle. After all, it's easy to say that a ship "was never seen again" when it sunk in the middle of the ocean. It's found that people making such claims tend to cite previous ones rather than actual research, and some incidents were entirely nonexistent.
