ArticleeLife2022
Humans actively sample evidence to support prior beliefs.
Article in eLife, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Contrast bias, not confirmation bias, shapes daily impression updating across social and non-social targets.The British journal of social psychology · 2026Article
- Exerting effort for non-instrumental information under risk.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Interaction of identity and beliefs with genetic literacy.American journal of human genetics · 2026Article
- Statistical misreasoning in online content about vaccines: Implications and recommendations for addressing disinformation.PloS one · 2026Article
- Blaming luck, claiming skill: Self-attribution bias in error assignment.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- How disconfirmatory evidence shapes confidence in decision-making.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Exploring the influence of moon phases and weather on mortality in a palliative care unit over a ten year period.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Emotion-Guided Attention Impacts Deliberate Multi-Evidence Emotion-Related Perceptual Decision-Making.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Article
- Initial Expectations and Confidence Affect the Formation of Novel Self-Beliefs and Their Revision.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Considering What We Know and What We Don't Know: Expectations and Confidence Guide Value Integration in Value-Based Decision-Making.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Hedonism as a motive for information search: biased information-seeking leads to biased beliefs.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Article
- Uncertainty about others' trustworthiness increases during adolescence and guides social information sampling.Scientific reports · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
No one likes to be wrong. Previous research has shown that participants may underweight information incompatible with previous choices, a phenomenon called confirmation bias. In this paper, we argue that a similar bias exists in the way information is actively sought. We investigate how choice influences information gathering using a perceptual choice task and find that participants sample more information from a previously chosen alternative. Furthermore, the higher the confidence in the initial choice, the more biased information sampling becomes. As a consequence, when faced with the possibility of revising an earlier decision, participants are more likely to stick with their original choice, even when incorrect. Critically, we show that agency controls this phenomenon. The effect disappears in a fixed sampling condition where presentation of evidence is controlled by the experimenter, suggesting that the way in which confirmatory evidence is acquired critically impacts the decision process. These results suggest active information acquisition plays a critical role in the propagation of strongly held beliefs over time.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.