Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: An Experimental Study of Confirmation Bias

事实证明，当人类吸收信息时，他们远远不是客观的。随着各种媒体和社交媒体平台深度融入我们的日常生活，了解人们对新信息的真实反应变得比以往任何时候都更加重要。确认偏差是指对证据的偏颇处理，偏向于某一假设，在人们的信息解读过程中起着重要作用。然而，关于确认偏差是如何被触发的，以及它如何影响人们的信念，最近的实证研究已经产生了混合的证据，所以确认偏差并没有被完全理解。这项研究将调查并提供更多关于确认偏差如何影响个体在被呈现信息时更新其对概率事件的信念的能力。这项研究的结果将帮助政策制定者设计最佳政策，帮助人们形成正确的信念，并防止信息来源操纵人们的信念。确认偏差有两种形式：动机确认偏差，指的是对由潜在偏好驱动的信息的偏见处理；非动机确认偏差，指的是对仅仅因为个人认为她的假设比替代假设更有可能是正确的而产生的信息的偏见处理。这项研究将是第一个利用对照实验室实验来分别识别和检验两种形式的确认偏差之间的潜在关系和相互作用的研究之一。偏差的识别在于引出实验受试者对概率事件的信念，受到二元评分规则的激励，并测量他们与贝叶斯后验信念的偏差。两种形式的确认偏差的分离依赖于不同的处理变量，即动机。这项研究将两个引起越来越多关注的话题联系在一起--确认偏差和动机推理。此外，这项研究将测试一个新的基于理论的框架用于分析确认偏差的有效性。这一裁决反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Humans have proven to be far from objective when they assimilate information. As various media and social media platforms have become deeply integrated within our everyday lives, it has become more important than ever to understand how people truly react to new information. Confirmation bias refers to the biased treatment of evidence in favor of a certain hypothesis, and plays an influential role in people’s information interpretation process. However, confirmation bias is not fully understood as recent empirical research have produced mixed evidence in regard to how confirmation bias is triggered and how it affects people’s beliefs. This study will investigate, and provide more insight into, how confirmation bias affects individuals’ abilities to update their beliefs about probabilistic events when they are presented with information. The results from this study will help policymakers design optimal policies that aid people in forming correct beliefs, and prevent information sources from manipulating people’s beliefs. There are two forms of confirmation bias: motivated confirmation bias, which refers to the biased treatment of information that is motivated by underlying preferences, and unmotivated confirmation bias, which refers to the biased treatment of information that arises simply because the individual believes her hypothesis is more likely to be true than alternative ones. This study will be among the first to utilize a controlled lab experiment to separately identify, and examine the potential relationship and interactions between the two forms of confirmation bias. Identification of the biases lies within eliciting experimental subjects’ beliefs about probabilistic events, incentivized with a binary scoring rule, and measuring their deviations from the Bayesian posterior beliefs. Separation of the two forms of confirmation bias relies on varying the treatment variable that is motivation. This study connects two topics that have attracted growing attention – confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. Additionally, this study will test the validity of a new theory-based framework for analyzing confirmation bias.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.