What's the difference between "cherry-picking" and "confirmation bias"?

GreICE I think has hit the intentional or concsious/unintended or unconscious here. It's right to consider the attention even paid to the data. I'm sort of talking about these big flipping things like global warming or Bigfoot where the data are more or less public domain. On the other hand, my private notice of the numerous nice things my mother-in-law has done, through confirmation bias, I've failed to note and respond to. Entirely unconsciously.
 
BPScooter said:
GreICE I think has hit the intentional or concsious/unintended or unconscious here. It's right to consider the attention even paid to the data. I'm sort of talking about these big flipping things like global warming or Bigfoot where the data are more or less public domain. On the other hand, my private notice of the numerous nice things my mother-in-law has done, through confirmation bias, I've failed to note and respond to. Entirely unconsciously.
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i have seen no such distinction in the psychological literature on confirmation bias.
 
athon said:
I fold and defer to Jeff. His explanation is better. :)

Athon
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Actually, it wasn't mine. It was Peter Wason's, who coined the term.
Wason, Peter C. (1960). "On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task"
 
As a matter of interest, how do you ensure, when filtering out 'irrelevant' data, that you don't lapse into 'cherry-picking'? :confused:
 
Aitch said:
As a matter of interest, how do you ensure, when filtering out 'irrelevant' data, that you don't lapse into 'cherry-picking'? :confused:
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I'm not sure any data are irrelevant. Making sure that data are reliably gathered and avoiding the threat to internal validity termed instrumentation error or checking on interobserver reliability before running a full blown experiment should help to avoid gathering "irrelevant data".
In other words, gathering data on whether your data collection produces reliable data is relevant.



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Let me try a replication of Wason's original demonstration. I will give you a triplet of whole numbers that follows a rule. Your task is to figure out that rule by giving me some triplets and finding out whether they follow that rule from my feedback - I'll tell you yes or no.
The triplet is 2,3,5.
 
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Jeff Corey said:
No. You said, "The other three don't. You forget about them." That the contradictory evidence.
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Ah. Forgetting something represents an effort to ignore it. Thus, when you forget random details, like what exactly was in the news article you read last week, or who sang a song that you like, you've actively ignored it.

Or your brain has just discarded less useful information. One of the two...
 
jeff corey said:
let me try a replication of wason's original demonstration. I will give you a triplet of whole numbers that follows a rule. Your task is to figure out that rule by giving me some triplets and finding out whether they follow that rule from my feedback - i'll tell you yes or no.
The triplet is 2,3,5.
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8,12,17
9,17,33
7,11,13
 
GreyICE said:
Ah. Forgetting something represents an effort to ignore it. Thus, when you forget random details, like what exactly was in the news article you read last week, or who sang a song that you like, you've actively ignored it.

Or your brain has just discarded less useful information. One of the two...
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The two main sources of forgetting are interference (either proactive or retroactive) and encoding failure. For an example of the latter, which penny is right? http://www.dcity.org/braingames/pennies/
No effort to ignore that has occurred.
 
Jeff Corey said:
The two main sources of forgetting are interference (either proactive or retroactive) and encoding failure. For an example of the latter, which penny is right? http://www.dcity.org/braingames/pennies/
No effort to ignore that has occurred.
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But suggesting it must be one and not the other because one wishes to interpret the actions of certain people in certain ways is most certainly not a good idea.
 
GreyICE said:
But suggesting it must be one and not the other because one wishes to interpret the actions of certain people in certain ways is most certainly not a good idea.
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Who was suggesting what? You said forgetting was caused by "...an effort to ignore it...Or your brain has just discarded less useful information. One of the two."
Neither explanation has any validity.
 
Jeff Corey said:
Who was suggesting what? You said forgetting was caused by "...an effort to ignore it...Or your brain has just discarded less useful information. One of the two."
Neither explanation has any validity.
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Uh huh. Let me follow: You claim it's belief persistence (a tendency to hold onto beliefs even when evidence contradicts them). This is best evidenced in things like doomsday cults, where even multiple passings of the 'end of the world' date don't necessarily debunk it for the believers.

I point out that remembering things that came true, and forgetting things that never happened is more like discarding useless information in favor of 'useful' information (or information that gives the illusion of usefulness), and that that is an entirely different thing.

Since then, you've rationalized your use of the term 'belief persistence' repeatedly.

Would my summary be correct or incorrect, and would the quoted post be more rationalization, or a useful addition to this discussion?
 
OK, it looks like there are no more takers, but all the triplets offered did fit the rule, which was "The triplets must be ascending numbers".
Wason's original triplet was "2,4,6" and approximately 80% of his subjects never generated exemplars that could falsify their hypotheses, like "6,4,2", or "1,2,223400012". This has been generally the case with subsequent replications.
I used 2,3,5 as the exemplar because I figured some people here would go the prime or fibonacci series route.
Wason called the avoidance of testing violations of the subject's hypothesis confirmation bias. And that surely is different from cherry picking, data mining or belief perseverance.
 
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AgeGap said:
The Stanford Prison Experiment (1971)......Subjects volunteered by simply responding to a newspaper ad ...

Confirmation bias
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How so? This is the education thread, and should be relatively free of half baked, uninformed opinions.
The OP was quite clear and a good question. Last week I used a similar question in the Critical Thinking final exam. It was to define confirmation bias, the file drawer effect and to tell how they differ.
A number of answers here would not have passed. Thankfully, none of the students said the difference was based on some conscious/unconscious fake dichotomy.
This whole issue came up on another thread a while back and UncaJimmy said I was being overly pedantic.
So be it.
 
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