Positive test strategies and confirmation bias in social assessment
By Jonathan Janzen, Flora Oswald, Richelle Acreman, Michael McCarthy, and Sven Van de Wetering in talks
May 18, 2018
Abstract
A talk my team gave on how confirmation bias influences social assessments.
Date
May 18, 2018
Time
2:45 PM – 3:00 PM
Location
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Event
Abstract
Snyder and Swann (1978) demonstrated that individuals systematically adopt confirmatory strategies and preferentially search for evidence that confirms existing beliefs. We suspect that Snyder and Swann’s results are an artifact of their methodology. In the present experiment, we replicated Snyder and Swann’s work, but had participants generate their own hypothesis testing questions instead of selecting questions from an existing list. Results did not replicate those of the original study.