Disconfirmation Bias Research Articles

Rating Systems under Customer Disconfirmation Bias: Asymptotic Behavior and Granularity

Rating Systems under Customer Disconfirmation Bias: Asymptotic Behavior and Granularity

Examining the Prevailing Negative Sentiments Surrounding Measles Vaccination: Unsupervised Deep Learning of Twitter Posts from 2017 to 2022.

Despite the proven safety and clinical efficacy of the Measles vaccine, many countries are seeing new heights of vaccine hesitancy or refusal, and are experiencing a resurgence of measles infections as a consequence. With the use of novel machine learning tools, we investigated the prevailing negative sentiments related to Measles vaccination through an analysis of public Twitter posts over a 5-year period. We extracted original tweets using the search terms related to "measles" and "vaccine," and posted in English from January 1, 2017, to December 15, 2022. Of these, 155,363 tweets were identified to be negative sentiment tweets from unique individuals, through the use of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) Named Entity Recognition and SieBERT, a pretrained sentiment in English analysis model. This was followed by topic modeling and qualitative thematic analysis performed inductively by the study investigators. A total of 11 topics were generated after applying BERTopic. To facilitate a global discussion of results, the topics were grouped into four different themes through iterative thematic analysis. These include (a) the rejection of "anti-vaxxers" or antivaccine sentiments, (b) misbeliefs and misinformation regarding Measles vaccination, (c) negative transference due to COVID-19 related policies, and (d) public reactions to contemporary Measles outbreaks. Theme 1 highlights that the current public discourse may further alienate those who are vaccine hesitant because of the disparaging language often used, while Themes 2 and 3 highlight the typology of misperceptions and misinformation underlying the negative sentiments related to Measles vaccination and the psychological tendency of disconfirmation bias. Nonetheless, the analysis was based solely on Twitter and only tweets in English were included; hence, the findings may not necessarily generalize to non-Western communities. It is important to further understand the thinking and feeling of those who are vaccine hesitant to address the issues at hand.

Not as expected: the role of performance expectations in voter responses to election pledge fulfilment

Not only the content, but also the context of election pledges should affect how voters respond to broken and fulfilled pledges. Borrowing from other disciplines, the hypotheses in this study propose that voters with low expectations reward pledge fulfilment more than voters with high expectations, while voters with high fulfilment expectations punish pledge-breakers more severely than voters with low expectations. A survey experiment using real-life political events was designed where 2465 respondents first received information that either significantly raised or lowered their expectations of pledge fulfilment. They were then presented with the actual fulfilment status of the pledge, either confirming or disconfirming their manipulated expectations, and asked to give their perceptions of the governing party’s performance. Interestingly, the findings support the presence of a confirmation, not a disconfirmation bias, suggesting that pledge performance attitudes are formed more similarly to other political attitudes than evaluations of private/public goods or services. Combined with a negativity bias in media coverage of election pledges, this confirmation bias in voters provides a partial explanation of the low esteem voters generally hold of governments’ pledge fulfilment. The results have implications for our understanding of how pledge fulfilment matters to voters, and how governments are held accountable for their performance.

Electoral Violence, Partisan Identity, and Perceptions of Election Quality: A Survey Experiment in West Bengal, India

What are the consequences of election violence for citizens' political attitudes? We argue that in polarized contexts, citizens' interpretation of electoral violence depends on their partisan affiliations. When presented with information alleging co-partisans' involvement in violence, people with strong partisan identities become more likely to assert that elections were free and fair. We test this expectation with a vignette experiment in West Bengal after India's 2019 elections, presenting respondents with information about violence while varying the partisan identity of the perpetrator. Consistent with expectations, supporters of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) increased their evaluations of election quality when hearing about co-partisan violence. We find no evidence of disconfirmation bias for Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporters; their recent shift to the party plausibly explains this finding.

What drives people to prefer health-related misinformation? The viewpoint of motivated reasoning

Introduction. This paper examines the potential of the motivated reasoning approach as a framework explaining why people prefer and use health-related misinformation. Method. Conceptual analysis of a sample of 41 studies drawing on the motivated reasoning approach examine the selection and use of information and misinformation. Results. Preferring and using health-related misinformation occur most likely when people are primarily driven by directional goals. They tend to give rise to confirmation bias which favours the adherence to existing beliefs about the relevance of information sources of certain types, for example, websites advocating anti-vaccination ideas. Moreover, disconfirmation bias results in the rejection of information that challenges the existing beliefs about an issue. Directional goals seldom appear in a pure form because motivated reasoning is also driven by accuracy goals motivating people to select and use information that enables them to support, justify and defend their beliefs against critique. Conclusion. Motivated reasoning offers a relatively robust psychological approach to the study of reasons by which people prefer and use misinformation in order to confirm their existing beliefs and to protect their identities. There is a need to explore further the potential and limitations of the motivated reasoning approach by conducting empirical research focusing on controversial and politicized issues such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Anxiety as a Positive Epistemic Emotion in Politics

ABSTRACT People suffer from a variety of cognitive shortcomings when forming and updating their political beliefs. Three pervasive shortcomings are confirmation bias, disconfirmation bias, and motivated reasoning. The emotional state of anxiety can help us overcome these biases given the open-minded, information-rich, reflective deliberation with diverse people it may promote—although mass and social media may hinder this type of deliberation.

Leveraging online review platforms to support public policy: Predicting restaurant health violations based on online reviews

Restaurant health inspections aim at identifying health violations and shall reduce the risk that restaurant visitors suffer from foodborne illness. Nevertheless, regulatory authorities' resources are limited, so an efficient mechanism that supports scheduling of health inspections is necessary. We build upon information efficiency theory and investigate whether information extracted from online review platforms is useful to predict restaurant health violations. Furthermore, we examine how the expectation disconfirmation bias impacts classification performance. Analyzing a large sample of health inspections, corresponding online reviews and restaurant visitor data, we propose and evaluate different predictive models. We find that classifiers specifically taking into account information from online review platforms outperform different baseline approaches. We thus show that online reviews encompass private information indicating strong information efficiency. Furthermore, we observe that the expectation disconfirmation bias has an influence on classification performance in case of restaurants with a low star rating and with a poor inspection history. An ensemble classifier can help to mitigate this influence. Thus, online review platforms contain relevant information to predict future health violations. Our results are highly relevant for regulatory authorities, restaurant visitors and restaurant owners.

Systematic Cognitive Bias in the History of Philosophy and its Cultural Transmission

This article argues influential eighteenth-century thinker Thomas Reid’s philosophical system gets infected with determinable cognitive biases when scientific claims jeopardize his core Christian commitments. These biases are most active, and led reliably to fallacious reasoning, when Reid writes about issues with implications on substance dualism and the human soul, and on the activity of supernatural agents in the material world. Falling into two halves, this article first presents cognitive biases (disconfirmation bias, motivated skepticism, selective attention), explaining the experimental context of their discovery and their sources in emotions. Next, the article walks through a series of textual case studies from published and unpublished writings that reveal the context, operation, and doxastic effects of these biases. Throughout special effort is made to empathize with Reid’s social context and its influence on his affirmation of fallacies in support of his faith.

Populist Twitter Posts in News Stories

ABSTRACTResearch in information processing suggests that the journalistic practice of embedding right-wing populist Twitter posts in news may stimulate political polarization. To test this notion, we conducted an online experiment (N = 379). We investigated how highlighted right-wing populist statements affected individuals from different ideological stances and whether potential effects were determined by Twitter-specific characteristics (Twitter frame, profile picture). We exposed participants to two articles, each including a statement by a politician of the Austrian Freedom Party. In the first group, the statements were not highlighted (control group). In the second and third group, the statements appeared as conventional block quotes either without (G2) or with (G3) a picture of the politician. In the fourth and fifth group, the statements were highlighted as Twitter posts, again either without (G4) or with (G5) a picture of the politician. Results revealed that all highlighting conditions increased statement recognition among left-wing individuals. However, the full Twitter post condition exerted the strongest effect. Higher recognition then decreased left-wing individuals’ anti-immigrant attitudes and sympathy toward the right-wing populist candidate. Thus, embedding right-wing populists’ Twitter posts may induce disconfirmation bias among left-wing voters and trigger a process in which they strengthen their initial attitudes.

The Effects of Time Pressure on the Belief Revisions of Nonprofessional Investors

This is the first study to experimentally investigate the interactive effects of time pressure and the order of information by integrating a time pressure variable into the predictions of the belief-adjustment (BA) model. Substantial research documents the continuing importance of both order effects and time pressure in a variety of accounting contexts. Prior accounting research (Kahle, Pinsker, & Pennington, 2005; Trotman & Wright, 2000) as well as Hogarth and Einhorn (1992) in their original article on the BA model have called for an investigation of the potential moderating effect of time pressure on order effects; however, no such research exists. We utilize psychology theories of arousal to propose and examine a path model of the effects of time pressure on nonprofessional investors’ belief revisions. Individual investors make a stock price judgment and a short-term investment decision following the receipt of a news announcement that contained mixed (i.e., positive and negative) information about the company’s stock. We manipulated the order in which the information is presented to participants and the time available to make the stock price judgment and investment decision. Our findings support the proposed model. First, investors trying to make a short-term profit under a time limit perceived significant time pressure, even when the time available to make the decision is equal to the time usually required under no time pressure to make such a decision. Second, perceived time pressure had a significant, positive effect on individual investors’ motivation but also on their stress and on perceived task difficulty. Perceived task difficulty had a significant interactive effect with the order of information on individual investors’ investment decisions and there is an optimal level of perceived time pressure and consequent perceived task difficulty at which order effects are eliminated. Third, greater motivation and stress caused increased stock price estimations and greater investments into the stock, which may explain individual investors’ excessive trading observed in prior research. This effect was reversed at very high levels of perceived task difficulty resulting in a disconfirmation bias, presumably to ease cognitive strain and to avoid a loss when the time is too short to make an informed decision.

Echo chamber and trench warfare dynamics in online debates.

In this article, we take issue with the claim by Sunstein and others that online discussion takes place in echo chambers, and suggest that the dynamics of online debates could be more aptly described by the logic of ‘trench warfare’, in which opinions are reinforced through contradiction as well as confirmation. We use a unique online survey and an experimental approach to investigate and test echo chamber and trench warfare dynamics in online debates. The results show that people do indeed claim to discuss with those who hold opposite views from themselves. Furthermore, our survey experiments suggest that both confirming and contradicting arguments have similar effects on attitude reinforcement. Together, this indicates that both echo chamber and trench warfare dynamics – a situation where attitudes are reinforced through both confirmation and disconfirmation biases – characterize online debates. However, we also find that two-sided neutral arguments have weaker effects on reinforcement than one-sided confirming and contradicting arguments, suggesting that online debates could contribute to collective learning and qualification of arguments.

The Effect of Negotiators’ Own Social Motives and Their Counterparts’ Social Motives on Trust

Although much is known about the effect of negotiators’ social motives on trust, little is known about how negotiators’ own social motives interact with their counterparts’ social motives. Based on false consensus effect, expectancy disconfirmation and negativity bias, we propose and test two sets of alternative hypotheses on the effects of negotiators’ own social motives and their counterpart’s social motives in a negotiation experiment. We predict that negotiating with an individualistic counterpart leads to lower trust than negotiating with a cooperative counterpart (H1a), especially for cooperators (H2a). Results of our study (N= 76) provided stronger support for H2a: Cooperative negotiators had lower trust when they negotiated with individualistic counterparts than when they negotiated with cooperative counterparts whereas individualistic negotiators were not influenced by their counterparts’ social motivation. Our mediation analysis showed that this happened because cooperators expected more coopera...

MOTIVATED SKEPTICISM IN THE EVALUATION OF POLITICAL BELIEFS (2006)

We propose a model of motivated skepticism that helps explain when and why citizens are biased information processors. Two experimental studies explore how citizens evaluate arguments about affirmative action and gun control, finding strong evidence of a prior attitude effect such that attitudinally congruent arguments are evaluated as stronger than attitudinally incongruent arguments. When reading pro and con arguments, participants (Ps) counterargue the contrary arguments and uncritically accept supporting arguments, evidence of a disconfirmation bias. We also find a confirmation bias—the seeking out of confirmatory evidence—when Ps are free to self-select the source of the arguments they read. Both the confirmation and disconfirmation biases lead to attitude polarization—the strengthening of t2 over t1 attitudes—especially among those with the strongest priors and highest levels of political sophistication. We conclude with a discussion of the normative implications of these findings for rational behavior in a democracy.

Motivated Reasoning and Public Opinion

Citizens, especially those who are knowledgeable and care the most about politics, are motivated to defend their beliefs and attitudes in the face of discrepant information. These motivated biases strongly influence the way people think about health care policies and the politicians and parties that propose or attack these contentious policies. Three cognitive mechanisms are identified: a prior belief effect, confirmation bias, and disconfirmation bias. Together, these information processes conspire to produce persistence and polarization of opinion on health care policies.

The effects of framing and ego-involvement on performance on the Wason selection task

Man?s deep-rooted tendency to maintain and reinforce a positive self-image makes man inclined to uncritically accept desirable information (the confirmation bias) as well as to criticize and reject undesirable information (the disconfirmation bias). Since disconfirmation strategy leads to a logically correct solution to the four-card Wason selection task, we predicted that ego-involvement manipulation would have a significant effect on the success rate of the task. Specifically, we hypothesized that subjects who were exposed to personally threatening information would try to reject it and thus be more successful on Wason task than those who were exposed to non-threatening information, as established in previously published study by Dawson et al. (2002a). Furthermore, we wanted to examine if manipulating valence framing of the Wason task rule would result in a higher success rate for the group exposed to the threatening and negatively framed rule (that implied their own early death) than the group exposed to the threatening but positively framed rule (that category of people other than the one they belong to live longer). One hundred ninety five high school students from Kragujevac, Serbia participated in the experiment. The results confirmed the expected effect of involvement, while the main effect of framing did not occur. However, there was a marginally significant involvement by framing interaction: unexpectedly, non involved participants were more likely to solve the task correctly when it was positively framed than when in was negatively framed, whilst in the involved group there was no difference in correct responding depending on framing. The findings suggest that the success rate in Wason task can be sensitive to the valence framing of the rule, but only when respondents are not highly personally threatened. Potential methodological interventions in ego-involvement manipulation and content of the rules are discussed.

The Social Origins of Folk Epistemology

Because reasoning allows us to justify our beliefs and evaluate these justifications it is central to folk epistemology. Following Sperber, and contrary to classical views, it will be argued that reasoning evolved not to complement individual cognition but as an argumentative device. This hypothesis is more consistent with the prevalence of the confirmation and disconfirmation biases. It will be suggested that these biases render the individual use of reasoning hazardous, but that when reasoning is used in its natural, argumentative, context they can represent a smart way to divide labor without loosing epistemic value.

The Motivated Processing of Political Arguments

We report the results of an experiment designed to replicate and extend recent findings on motivated political reasoning. In particular, we are interested in disconfirmation biases - the tendency to counter-argue or discount information with which one disagrees - in the processing of political arguments on policy issues. Our experiment examines 8 issues, including some of local relevance and some of national relevance, and manipulates the presentation format of the policy arguments. We find strong support for our basic disconfirmation hypothesis: people seem unable to ignore their prior beliefs when processing arguments or evidence. We also find that this bias is moderated by political sophistication and strength of prior attitude. We do not find, however, that argument type matters, suggesting that motivated biases are quite robust to changes in argument format. Finally, we find strong support for the polarization of attitudes as a consequence of biased processing.

Biased Information Search in Homogeneous Groups: Confidence as a Moderator for the Effect of Anticipated Task Requirements

When searching for information, groups that are homogeneous regarding their members' prediscussion decision preferences show a strong bias for information that supports rather than conflicts with the prevailing opinion (confirmation bias). The present research examined whether homogeneous groups blindly search for information confirming their beliefs irrespective of the anticipated task or whether they are sensitive to the usefulness of new information for this forthcoming task. Results of three experiments show that task sensitivity depends on the groups' confidence in the correctness of their decision: Moderately confident groups displayed a strong confirmation bias when they anticipated having to give reasons for their decision but showed a balanced information search or even a dis confirmation bias (i.e., predominately seeking conflicting information) when they anticipated having to refute counterarguments. In contrast, highly confident groups demonstrated a strong confirmation bias independent of the anticipated task requirements.

The Motivated Processing of Political Arguments

We report the results of an experiment designed to replicate and extend recent findings on motivated political reasoning. In particular, we are interested in disconfirmation biases - the tendency to counter-argue or discount information with which one disagrees - in the processing of political arguments on policy issues. Our experiment examines 8 issues, including some of local relevance and some of national relevance, and manipulates the presentation format of the policy arguments. We find strong support for our basic disconfirmation hypothesis: people seem unable to ignore their prior beliefs when processing arguments or evidence. We also find that this bias is moderated by political sophistication and strength of prior attitude. We do not find, however, that argument type matters, suggesting that motivated biases are quite robust to changes in argument format. Finally, we find strong support for the polarization of attitudes as a consequence of biased processing.

Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs

We propose a model of motivated skepticism that helps explain when and why citizens are biased‐information processors. Two experimental studies explore how citizens evaluate arguments about affirmative action and gun control, finding strong evidence of a prior attitude effect such that attitudinally congruent arguments are evaluated as stronger than attitudinally incongruent arguments. When reading pro and con arguments, participants (Ps) counterargue the contrary arguments and uncritically accept supporting arguments, evidence of a disconfirmation bias. We also find a confirmation bias—the seeking out of confirmatory evidence—when Ps are free to self‐select the source of the arguments they read. Both the confirmation and disconfirmation biases lead to attitude polarization—the strengthening of t2 over t1 attitudes—especially among those with the strongest priors and highest levels of political sophistication. We conclude with a discussion of the normative implications of these findings for rational behavior in a democracy.