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

事实证明，人类在吸收信息时远非客观。随着各种媒体和社交媒体平台与我们的日常生活深度融合，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。证实偏差是指人们对证据的偏向性处理，它在人们的信息解释过程中起着重要的作用。然而，确认偏差并没有得到充分的理解，因为最近的实证研究已经产生了关于确认偏差如何触发以及它如何影响人们的信念的混合证据。本研究将调查，并提供更多的见解，如何确认偏见影响个人的能力，更新他们的信念概率事件时，他们与信息。本研究的结果将有助于决策者设计最佳政策，帮助人们形成正确的信念，并防止信息源操纵人们的信念。确认偏误有两种形式：动机性确认偏误，指的是受潜在偏好激发的对信息的有偏见的处理;无动机确认偏误，指的是对信息的有偏见的处理，这仅仅是因为个人认为她的假设比其他假设更有可能是正确的。这项研究将是第一个利用受控实验室实验来分别识别和检查两种形式的确认偏差之间的潜在关系和相互作用的研究。识别的偏见在于引发实验对象的概率事件的信念，激励与二进制评分规则，并测量他们的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治疗变量，即动机。本研究连接了两个日益受到关注的主题-确认偏差和动机性推理。此外，这项研究将测试一个新的理论为基础的框架，分析确认bias.This奖项反映了NSF的法定使命的有效性，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

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.