Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: An Experimental Study of Confirmation Bias

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

Humans have proven to be far from objective when they assimilate information. As various media and social media platforms have become deeply integrated within our everyday lives, it has become more important than ever to understand how people truly react to new information. Confirmation bias refers to the biased treatment of evidence in favor of a certain hypothesis, and plays an influential role in people’s information interpretation process. However, confirmation bias is not fully understood as recent empirical research have produced mixed evidence in regard to how confirmation bias is triggered and how it affects people’s beliefs. This study will investigate, and provide more insight into, how confirmation bias affects individuals’ abilities to update their beliefs about probabilistic events when they are presented with information. The results from this study will help policymakers design optimal policies that aid people in forming correct beliefs, and prevent information sources from manipulating people’s beliefs. There are two forms of confirmation bias: motivated confirmation bias, which refers to the biased treatment of information that is motivated by underlying preferences, and unmotivated confirmation bias, which refers to the biased treatment of information that arises simply because the individual believes her hypothesis is more likely to be true than alternative ones. This study will be among the first to utilize a controlled lab experiment to separately identify, and examine the potential relationship and interactions between the two forms of confirmation bias. Identification of the biases lies within eliciting experimental subjects’ beliefs about probabilistic events, incentivized with a binary scoring rule, and measuring their deviations from the Bayesian posterior beliefs. Separation of the two forms of confirmation bias relies on varying the treatment variable that is motivation. This study connects two topics that have attracted growing attention – confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. Additionally, this study will test the validity of a new theory-based framework for analyzing confirmation bias. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.