The review of my book, "Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind" (April 27), unintentionally provides a vivid illustration of what scientists call confirmation bias: once we get an idea, we stick to it even in the face of contradictory evidence.
The mixed results have turned the images into a sort of cosmic Rorschach test, with some scientists seeing confirmation of existing theories, and others seeing the first dark hints that those theories are -- if not entirely wrong -- at least in need of serious revision.
That's especially true when, like "fake news," the lie supports our own beliefs about the world, which social scientists call confirmation bias.
Like all human beings, scientists are confirmation-biased (i.e. tend to select information that supports their hypotheses about the world) [19], [20], [21], and they are far from indifferent to the outcome of their own research: positive results make them happy and negative ones disappointed [22].
These formulas apply to ( 1) "a famous episode from the history of astronomy which clearly illustrated striking asymmetries in 'normal' scientists' reactions to confirmation and refutation.
But as scientists wait for confirmation on elements 115 and 113, the data presented by the Dubna and Livermore groups appear solid, said Dr. Sigurd Hofmann, a nuclear physicist at the Institute for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, the laboratory where Darmstadtium was found.
In exchange for permission to sequence the DNA, Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues agreed that they would share the data with other scientists only for confirmation of the findings in the Nature study.
For the first time ever, scientists have direct confirmation that a Wolf-Rayet star sitting 360 million light years away in the Bootes constellation died in a violent explosion known as a Type IIb supernova.
Now, for the first time, scientists have direct confirmation that a Wolf-Rayet star died in a supernova.
Once the testing was completed at AFDIL and the GMI, electropherograms of the data and tabulated results were sent to an independent scientist (PG) for confirmation and concordance of the data.
