We've been talking about confirmation bias, which is the
tendency to seek out data that confirm one's preconceptions,
while ignoring data that conflict with those preconceptions. But
there is a flip-side to this phenomenon known as disconfirmation
bias.Yes, we're quite knowledgeable about confirmation bias, and
we routinely deal with denialism, which is ignoring
contradicting evidence. Of course, on the topic of evolution
versus creationism, Creationists, to my knowledge, have never
bothered coming up with examples of what would be confirming or
contradicting evidence for their unfalsifiable "hypothesis."
Quotes from some psychologists: When evaluating an argument, can
one assess its strength independently of one's prior belief in
the conclusion? A good deal of evidence indicates the answer is
an emphatic no. This phenomenon, which we refer to as the prior
belief effect, has important implications. Given two people, or
groups, with opposing beliefs about a social, political, or
scientific issue, the degree to