Tuesday, March 24, 2026

The One Bias Underlying the Others

Steve Stewart-Williams at N3 called it "One Bias to Rule them All" and links to Toward Parsimony in Bias Research. 

...the current article seeks to bring a set of biases together by suggesting that they might actually share the same “recipe.” Specifically, we suggest that they are based on prior beliefs plus belief-consistent information processing. Put differently, we raise the question of whether a finite number of different biases—at the process level—represent variants of “confirmation bias,” or peoples’ tendency to process information in a way that is consistent with their prior beliefs.  

It sounds plausible. We give up our ideas slowly, likely for good reason. James once mildly pointed out to me that we can't do a complete examen on all our beliefs every day. We would have no time left over for dinner.

1 comment:

Grim said...

This strikes me as plausible. It may be open to future revisions or sophistications, but parsimony here might be a good place to start.