Confirmation bias – myside bias

Abstract

People do not have a general tendency to confirm anything they think about – a confirmation bias. Instead, people have a tendency to think of reasons why their intuitions are correct – a myside bias. The myside bias must be distinguished from taking our prior beliefs into account, for instance when deciding what information to accept, which is perfectly rational. In spite of numerous methodological challenges, the existence of the myside bias is now well-attested. Arguably, the myside bias only affects human reason, and not other cognitive mechanisms; moreover, it only affects the production of reasons, and not the evaluation of reasons offered by others. Even though the myside bias is typically considered to be a flaw, when people reason in the right social context, it is revealed to be an adaptive feature of human reason.