The confirmation bias
November 14th, 2008
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I am fascinated with cognitive biases. I’ve mentioned the confirmation bias before and whilst reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicolas Taleb (who is a big fan, as am I, of Kahneman & Tversky), I was reminded of the following statistic which I found in Mintzberg’s Strategy Bites Back
by Spyros G. Makridakis (pg. 168): believers remember 100% of confirming evidence but only have 40% accuracy when recalling disconfirming evidence. On the other hand skeptics can recall 90% of both confirming and disconfirming evidence.
A fact worth remembering when you’re next reading something



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