Confirmation Bias Quotes

“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory.

The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control.

The world is rudderless.”
― Alan Moore

“Please, let us not stick to our comfortable confirmation biases, seeking out our holy truths based on our preexisting beliefs. Viewpoints differing from our own are a blessing to tear open the canvas of ignorance covering our lives. (" No longer in the middle")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us?”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis”
― Antony Beevor

“People believe what they want to believe and then look for reasons to reinforce their beliefs.”
― Abhaidev, The Meaninglessness of Meaning

“The proliferation of material means that people might start to become selective about what they consume and, if my instincts are correct, they are likely to read only that which confirms what they already know. This means they will never have their ideas tested. I worry that as a result, people will form tight groups around those who confirm their biases, mistrusting those whom they encounter who think differently.”
― Una McCormack

“…the world doesn’t exist to amplify or exemplify our own preexisting tastes, values, or predilections. It simply exists. We don’t have to like all of it, or remain mute in the face of our discontent. But there’s a difference between going to art with the hope that it will reify a belief or value we already hold, and feeling angry or punitive when it doesn’t, and going to art to see what it’s doing, what’s going on, treating it as a place to get “the real and irregular news of how others around [us] think and feel,” as Eileen Myles once put it.”
― Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint

“Since there is nothing new under the sun. The aim of motivation is to confirm what you already know. Simply, clearing your doubts.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“Whether we regard someone’s opinion as a fact or as an opinion depends on whether they are criticizing or complimenting us.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“We all also suffer from confirmation bias, the tendency to spot evidence in support of a proposition that we already think is true. So it is not always the case that people start with a belief and then set out to communicate it; much of the bullshit to which we are exposed comes from folks who have a compelling reason to communicate something and then come to believe it. Or to think they believe it.”
― Evan Davis

“Сперва ученый подъезжает в них необыкновенным подлецом, начинает робко, умеренно, начинает самым смиренным запросом: не оттуда ли? не из того ли угла получила имя такая-то страна? или: не принадлежит ли этот документ к другому, позднейшему времени? или: не нужно ли под этим народом разуметь вот какой народ? Цитует немедленно тех и других древних писателей и чуть только видит какой-нибудь намек или просто показалось ему намеком, уж он получает рысь и бодрится, разговаривает с древними писателями запросто, задает им запросы и сам даже отвечает за них, позабывая вовсе о том, что начал робким предположением; ему уже кажется, что он это видит, что это ясно, — и рассуждение заключено словами: «так это вот как было, так вот какой народ нужно разуметь, так вот с какой точки нужно смотреть на предмет!» Потом во всеуслышанье с кафедры, — и новооткрытая истина пошла гулять по свету, набирая себе последователей и поклонников”
― Николай Гоголь, Мертвые души

“Data has an annoying way of conforming itself to support whatever point of view we want it to support.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck

“Exactly," he answers again, with that patronizing smile. Watson's approach to science contains such a vital flaw it nearly takes my breath away. How can one call oneself a scientist and begin one's investigation with a conclusion instead of building to one only after exhaustive research?”
― Marie Benedict, Her Hidden Genius

“Van Helsing: I heard once of an American who so defined faith: 'That faculty, which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.'... He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of a big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck. We get the small truth first. good! We keep him, and we value him; but all the same we must not let him think himself all the truth in the universe.

Dr. Seward: Then you want me not to let some previous conviction injure the receptivity of my mind with regard to some strange matter. Do I read your lesson aright?

Van Helsing: Ah, you are my favorite pupil still. It is worth to teach you. Now that you are willing to understand, you have taken the first step to understand.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“...[E]ven yet I do not expect you to believe. It is so hard to accept at once any abstract truth, that we may doubt such to be possible when we have always believed the ‘no’ of it...”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Brandon is just the kind of man,” said Willoughby one day, when they were talking of him together, “whom every body speaks well of, and nobody cares about; whom all are delighted to see, and nobody remembers to talk to.” ...[Maryanne speaking] “I do not dislike him. I consider him, on the contrary, as a very respectable man, who has every body’s good word, and nobody’s notice; who has more money than he can spend, more time than he knows how to employ, and two new coats every year.”
“Add to which,” cried Marianne, “that he has neither genius, taste, nor spirit. That his understanding has no brilliancy, his feelings no ardour, and his voice no expression.”
“You decide on his imperfections so much in the mass,” replied Elinor, “and so much on the strength of your own imagination, that the commendation I am able to give of him is comparatively cold and insipid... “But perhaps the abuse of such people as yourself and Marianne will make amends for the regard of Lady Middleton and her mother. If their praise is censure, your censure may be praise, for they are not more undiscerning, than you are prejudiced and unjust.”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

“In addition to the confirmation bias and circular reasoning of the worldview-assumption filter, the Münchausen trilemma eliminates any natural way of reaching the truth. Every argument needs true premises, and those premises require an additional argument to prove them. The result is an infinite regression of unproven proofs.”
― Petros Scientia, Exposing the REAL Creation-Evolution Debate: The Absolute Proof of the Biblical Account

“Whenever I was too straitly pressed with objections and arguments against any of my sentiments, and when doubts began to arise in my mind, to put off the uneasiness occasioned by them, my constant practice was to recollect, as far as I could, all the reasonings and interpretations of Scripture on the other side of the question; and when this failed of affording satisfaction, I had recourse to controversial writings. This drew me aside from the pure Word of God, rendered me more remiss and formal in prayer, and furnished me with defensive armour against my convictions, with fuel for my passions, and food for my pride and self-sufficiency.”
― Thomas Scott, The Force of Truth

“Research is often the search for facts that support one’s prejudice(s); and the ignoring, and/or even hiding, of facts that do the opposite.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Scientists see what they want to see, and think what their paradigm requires them to think. The paradigm in which science is conducted dictates the way in which scientists make sense of the supposedly objective data that their experiments generate. A different paradigm would lead to a drastically different understanding and treatment of the same data. This is a fact that scientists have never understood, and refuse to acknowledge. Not a single neuroscientist on earth would ever interpret any data whatsoever as suggesting that the mind is separate from the brain, hence every interpretation already reflects the conclusion – established before a single experiment has been performed – that the brain is the source of the mind. Is that what we call “science”?”
― Thomas Stark, Extra Scientiam Nulla Salus: How Science Undermines Reason

“Experiments are never used to generate new paradigms, but to provide data to be interpreted by the current prevailing data, the “establishment” paradigm. Scientists claim to support a falsification principle, and to strenuously attempt to falsify their theories. This is the uttermost self-delusion. Scientists in fact go to tremendous lengths to defend their paradigm against falsification, and to deny that any falsification has taken place even when the data is unambiguous that it has. Scientists will simply reinterpret the results of any inconvenient experiments to explain away any anomalies, or they will add ad hoc hypotheses to bolster existing theories rather than discard those theories.”
― Thomas Stark, Extra Scientiam Nulla Salus: How Science Undermines Reason

“Therefore, everything the marginalized individual interprets as racism is considered racism by default—an episteme that encourages confirmation bias and leaves wide open the door to the unscrupulous.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Stories are powerful and memorable. That is why I have told so many in this book. But an individual anecdote can only serve as an illustration. To really convince yourself, much less others, we need to change the way we do things: we need data, and lots of it. [...] People become overconfident because they never bother to document their past track record of wrong predictions, and then they make things worse by falling victim to the dreaded confirmation bias - they only look for evidence that confirms their preconceived hypotheses. The only protection against overconfidence is to systematically collect data, especially data that can prove you wrong. [...] "If you don't write it down, it doesn't exist". In addition, most organizations have an urgent need to learn how to learn, and then commit to this learning in order to accumulate knowledge over time. At the very least this means trying new things and keeping track of what happens. Even better would be to run actual experiments. [...] The ideal organizational environment encourages everyone to observe, collect data, and speak up.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

“In social science, in contrast to natural science, it seems that by the time one goes in search of empirical evidence, a favored theory has already been chosen, and evidence is being gathered not in order to test it but in order to confirm it.”
― Lee McIntyre, Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavior

“In his summary of these heroic efforts on the part of the behavioral geneticists to meet this frequent objection of the environmentalists [that identical (MZ) twins develop similarly because they are treated more similarly than fraternal (DZ) twins], [Kenneth] Kendler made no mention of the complete substantiation these studies have received from the Minnesota and Swedish reared-apart twin studies, which lack the potential pitfall of different MZ-DZ upbringings in the same home. He laboriously showed that the one complaint has no basis in fact. It would seem to put to rest once and for all this one complaint and force the critics to find different ones.

This was not to be the case. For more than ten years after Kendler’s paper, opponents continued to cite the possibility of different upbringings given identicals as opposed to fraternals as invalidating twin studies. As late as 1994, the objection was raised in the pages of Scientific American. Sometimes the criticism is not alluded to directly. When other critics referred darkly to the “seriously flawed” nature of twin studies that compared monozygotic with dizygotic twins, more often than not the unnamed flaw turned out to be the one Kendler and others had refuted a decade earlier. And there is no possibility the critics who keep resurrecting this charge are unaware of the refutation. Each time the flaw is cited in print, a weary behavioral geneticist will write a letter to the editor pointing out the research that obviates the complaint, but the critics continue to make it year after year.

As an outsider, I came into this field believing scientists were simply truth seekers, men and women dedicated to discovering the functioning of the world around them, to understanding the givens. I saw them as driven by profound curiosity. It was, therefore, disheartening for me to learn that many scientists with broad reputations do not place truth at the top of their agendas and react in sadly unscientific ways when confronted with evidence they feel threatens their ideological positions. Aware of the scientific rules, they first attempt to discredit with counterarguments, but when these are shown empirically to be invalid, they simply pretend that the evidence they were unable to shoot down doesn’t exist. Such selective memory permeates the behavioral genetics debate. In the nonscientific world we have a word for such behavior: dishonesty.”
― William Wright, Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality

“You're more inclined to make a new investment after having success on your most recent transaction.”
― Coreen T. Sol, CFA

“From the very beginnings of our story as followers of Jesus, we have recognized and honoured the fundamental truth that every person is made in the image of God. Yet, while we are quick to celebrate those aspects of the divine image with which we personally relate, we all too quickly reject and denounce those that are different than ourselves as suspect or lesser than or sinful.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“called Xenophone”
― Monty Roberts, The Man Who Listens to Horses

“Seek with enough conviction aforethought and ye shall find.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“Read what agrees with you but read twice the amount of disagreeable stuff. Let yourself be reinforced or, perhaps, persuaded.”
― Keith Caserta