Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises
Raymond Nickerson · 1998
"People systematically seek out, interpret, and remember information in ways that confirm their existing beliefs, while ignoring or discounting evidence that contradicts them — making it one of the most pervasive and hardest-to-correct biases because it operates on what evidence gets noticed in the first place, not just how it's judged afterward."
Nickerson's review pulls together decades of scattered research to show confirmation bias isn't one narrow effect but a pattern that shows up in nearly every stage of reasoning: which questions we choose to ask, which sources we choose to consult, how we interpret ambiguous evidence, and what we remember afterward. All of these steps tend to tilt toward confirming what we already believed going in, often without any conscious intent to be biased.
Read more about the topic
Eight Cognitive Laws Worth Knowing Early
"A compact list of well-established cognitive and social effects — led by the Dunning-Kruger effect — that repeatedly explain why confident people are often wrong and quiet people are often right."