Confirmation Bias and The Scientific Method I: How to Avoid Confirmation Bias

Originally broadcast on March 04, 2024.

Explore the negative impact of confirmation bias on your reasoning and results and learn strategies to defend against it for more scientifically rigorous experiments.

In this tutorial, you will learn:

What confirmation bias is and whether it impacts your reasoning;
How it can harm your experimental designs and your findings;
Strategies to defend your work and thinking from confirmation bias for a more scientifically rigorous approach.
For many researchers, modern science has become about getting results rather than asking questions. Results mean publications, and publications mean more funding.

However, results are not the objective of the scientific method, which involves proposing an answer to a question, designing experiments to determine whether the proposed answer is true or false, and objectively interpreting the results.

Nonetheless, the results-focused attitude to doing science is widespread, and it comes with a huge drawback—it encourages confirmation bias—making us prone to searching for evidence and interpreting findings to support proposed answers we believe to be true.

Part I of Confirmation Bias and The Scientific Method explores what confirmation bias is and how to avoid it.

Learn why confirmation bias is so common, how it creeps into our thinking, and how it degrades the quality of our experimental designs and findings. Plus, test the objectivity of your reasoning with some simple reasoning exercises.

You will come away from this tutorial with the tools needed to defend against confirmation bias, challenge what you believe, and reorient yourself from a results-focused outlook to a method-focused one.

Watch Part II to learn how to apply the scientific method to your research.    • Confirmation Bias and The Scientific Metho...  

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