Belief bias

"Religious bias" redirects here. For treating people unequally because of their religion, see Religious discrimination. For the systematic mistreatment people based on their religion, see Religious persecution.

Belief bias is the tendency to judge the strength of arguments based on the plausibility of their conclusion rather than how strongly they justify that conclusion.[1] A person is more likely to accept an argument that supports a conclusion that aligns with their values, beliefs and prior knowledge, while rejecting counter arguments to the conclusion.[2] Belief bias is an extremely common and therefore significant form of error; we can easily be blinded by our beliefs and reach the wrong conclusion. Belief bias has been found to influence various reasoning tasks, including conditional reasoning,[3] relation reasoning[4] and transitive reasoning.[5]

  1. ^ Robert J. Sternberg; Jacqueline P. Leighton (2004). The Nature of Reasoning. Cambridge University Press. p. 300. ISBN 978-0-521-00928-7. Retrieved 3 September 2013.
  2. ^ Evans, Jonathan; Newstead, Stephen; Byrne, Ruth (1993). Human Reasoning: The Psychology of Deduction. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. p. 243. ISBN 9780863773136. Retrieved 26 January 2017. belief bias.
  3. ^ Evans, Jonathan St. B. T.; Handley, Simon J.; Bacon, Alison M. (2009-01-01). "Reasoning Under Time Pressure". Experimental Psychology. 56 (2): 77–83. doi:10.1027/1618-3169.56.2.77. ISSN 1618-3169. PMID 19261582.
  4. ^ Andrews, Glenda (2010-10-01). "Belief-based and analytic processing in transitive inference depends on premise integration difficulty". Memory & Cognition. 38 (7): 928–940. doi:10.3758/MC.38.7.928. hdl:10072/35167. ISSN 0090-502X. PMID 20921105.
  5. ^ Roberts, Maxwell J.; Sykes, Elizabeth D. A. (2003-01-01). "Belief bias and relational reasoning". The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A. 56 (1): 131–154. doi:10.1080/02724980244000233. ISSN 0272-4987. PMID 12587899. S2CID 44544112.