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A University of New Mexico research team conducted a data analysis that has found that as a larger portion of the population gets vaccinated against COVID-19, it becomes economically advantageous to start relaxing social distancing measures and open businesses.

The study looked at data from four metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) within the United States: Seattle, New York City, Los Angeles and Houston from January 21 to July 8, 2020. The four cities were chosen because they have had divergent trends with the virus (Seattle and New York City were early hotspots, while Los Angeles and Houston peaked in the summer).

"Our work is quantitative, so it can hopefully offer some evidence that shows the vaccines are going to allow us to loosen social distancing measures, including opening businesses," he said. "It provides a measure of hope as we go forward and increase the percentage of citizens who are vaccinated."

New research from Mildred Warner, professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University, shows that state laws designed to hinder union activity and indulge corporate entities do not enhance economic productivity.

"These interests see union and city power as a threat, which is why there are groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, for example, focused on crafting state laws that erode labor protections and enhance corporate interests."

"The anti-union political environment in the U.S. is longstanding," Warner said, "especially in the South, as reflected by right-to-work laws by constraining unions' ability to organize and collect dues."

Water scarcity is often understood as a problem for regions experiencing drought, but a new study from Cornell and Tufts universities finds that not only can localized water shortages impact the global economy, but changes in global demand send positive and negative ripple effects to water basins across the globe.

"Evaluating the economic impact of water scarcity in a changing world," was published March 26 in Nature Communications, and uniquely captures the interdependent effects of global trade consistently with differences in regional climate policies as well as river basin-specific capacity to address water scarcity risks.

The researchers coupled physical and economic models to simulate thousands of potential climate futures for 235 major river basins -- a technique known as scenario discovery -- to better understand how water scarcity is a globally-connected phenomenon, with local conditions having reverberations across the globe in industries such as agriculture, energy, transportation and manufacturing.

Why Did the Dean of the Most Diverse Law School in the Country Cancel Herself?

Was it the unfortunate use of a single word? Or something far more complicated?

Mary Lu Bilek, who has spent 32 years at the law school at the City University of New York, the past five of them as dean, sent an email to students and faculty with the subject line: “Apology.”

Researchers studying the Swiss energy market have found that making green energy the default option for consumers leads to an enduring shift to renewables and thus has the potential to cut CO2 emissions by millions of tonnes.

Both business and private customers largely accepted the default option, even though it was slightly more expensive, and the switch to green sources proved a lasting one.

Both companies restructured their products to offer a choice between conventional power, renewable power and "renewable plus," one company in 2009 and the other in 2016.

For more than a century, the United States has been the world's economic powerhouse.

The US is on the verge of its longest economic expansion on record

Last May, the US economy's streak of more than eight years of economic growth became the nation's second longest on record. It's been a slow climb following the Great Recession, but it's growth nonetheless.

The ‘Old American Dream,’ a Trap as the Floods Keep Coming

Still, she wanted so badly to keep her word.

In her kitchen, Juanita Hall routinely found opossums staring back at her from the cage trap she kept under the table

How Do I Dress for My Pandemic Belly?

Vanessa Friedman, fashion director of The New York Times, takes reader questions.

I have never had a waist or hips; in my 20s I always described myself as “straight up and down.”

Who Is Still Buying VHS Tapes?

Despite the rise of streaming, there is still a vast library of moving images that are categorically unavailable anywhere else. Also a big nostalgia factor.

The last VCR, according to Dave Rodriguez, 33, a digital repository librarian at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Fla., was produced in 2016

Confirmation bias is one of the most widely discussed epistemically problematic cognitions, challenging reliable belief formation and the correction of inaccurate views. Given its problematic nature, it remains unclear why the bias evolved and is still with us today. To offer an explanation, several philosophers and scientists have argued that the bias is in fact adaptive. I critically discuss three recent proposals of this kind before developing a novel alternative, what I call the ‘reality-matching account’

Confirmation bias is typically viewed as an epistemically pernicious tendency. For instance, Mercier and Sperber (2017: 215) maintain that the bias impedes the formation of well-founded beliefs, reduces people’s ability to correct their mistaken views, and makes them, when they reason on their own, “become overconfident” (Mercier 2016: 110).

Information disorder in current information ecosystems arises not only from the publication of “fake news,” but also from individuals' subjective reading of news and from their propagating news to others. Sometimes the difference between real and fake information is apparent. However, often a message is written to evoke certain emotions and opinions by taking partially true base stories and injecting false statements such that the information looks realistic. In addition, the perception of the trustworthiness of news is often influenced by confirmation bias. As a result, people often believe distorted or outright incorrect news and spread such misinformation further. For example, it was shown that in the months preceding the 2016 American presidential election, organizations from both Russia and Iran ran organized efforts to create such stories and spread them on Twitter and Facebook (Cohen, 2018). It is therefore important to raise internet users' awareness of such practices. Key to this is providing users with means to understand whether information should be trusted or not.

In this section, we discuss how social networks increase the spread of biased news and misinformation. We discuss confirmation bias, echo chambers and other factors that may subconsciously influence a person's opinion. We show how these processes can interact to form a vicious circle that favors the rise of untrustworthy sources. Often, when an individual thinks they know something, they are satisfied by an explanation that confirms their belief, without necessarily considering all possible other explanations, and regardless of the veracity of this information. This is confirmation bias in action. Nickerson (1998) defined it as the tendency of people to both seek and interpret evidence that supports an already-held belief.

Confirmation Bias: "subconscious tendency to seek and interpret information and other evidence in ways that affirm our existing beliefs, ideas, expectations, and/or hypotheses. Therefore, confirmation bias is both affected by and feeds our implicit biases. It can be most entrenched around beliefs and ideas that we are strongly attached to or that provoke a strong emotional response." Source: Facing History and Ourselves (This is a link to a lesson plan).

In this scenario, your decision was affected by

confirmation bias. With this, you interpret market information in a way that confirms your preconceptions – instead of seeing it objectively – and you make wrong decisions as a result. Confirmation bias is one of many psychological biases to which we're all susceptible when we make decisions. In this article, we'll look at common types of bias, and we'll outline what you can do to avoid them.

Psychologists Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky introduced the concept of psychological bias in the early 1970s. They published their findings in their 1982 book, "Judgment Under Uncertainty." They explained that psychological bias – also known as cognitive bias – is the tendency to make decisions or take action in an illogical way. For example, you might subconsciously make selective use of data, or you might feel pressured to make a decision by powerful colleagues. Psychological bias is the opposite of common sense and clear, measured judgment. It can lead to missed opportunities and poor decision making.

Confirmation bias is a ubiquitous phenomenon, the effects of which have been traced as far back as Pythagoras’ studies of harmonic relationships in the 6th century B.C. (Nickerson, 1998), and is referenced in the writings of William Shakespeare and Francis Bacon (Risinger, Saks, Thompson, & Rosenthal, 2002). It is also a problematic phenomenon, having been implicated in “a significant fraction of the disputes, altercations, and misunderstandings that occur among individuals, groups, and nations” throughout human history, including the witch trials of Western Europe and New England, and the perpetuation of inaccurate medical diagnoses, ineffective medical treatments, and erroneous scientific theories (Nickerson, 1998, p. 175).

For over a century, psychologists have observed that people naturally favor information that is consistent with their beliefs or desires, and ignore or discount evidence to the contrary. In an article titled “The Mind’s Eye,” Jastrow (1899) was among the first to explain how the mind plays an active role in information processing, such that two individuals with different mindsets might interpret the same information in entirely different ways (see also Boring, 1930). Since then, a wealth of empirical research has demonstrated that confirmation bias affects how we perceive visual stimuli (e.g., Bruner & Potter, 1964; Leeper, 1935), how we gather and evaluate evidence (e.g., Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979; Wason, 1960), and how we judge—and behave toward—other people (e.g., Asch, 1946; Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1966; Snyder & Swann, 1978).

Confirmation bias (Wason, 1960) occurs when people seek out or evaluate information in a way that fits with their existing thinking and preconceptions. The domain of science, where theories should advance based on both falsifying and supporting evidence, has not been immune to bias, which is often associated with people processing hypotheses in ways that end up confirming them (Oswald & Grosjean, 2004). Similarly, a consumer who likes a particular brand and researches a new purchase may be motivated to seek out customer reviews on the internet that favor that brand. Confirmation bias has also been related to unmotivated processes, including primacy effects and anchoring, evident in a reliance on information that is encountered early in a process (Nickerson, 1998).

The confirmation bias is a cognitive bias that causes people to search for, favor, interpret, and recall information in a way that confirms their preexisting beliefs. For example, if someone is presented with a lot of information on a certain topic, the confirmation bias can cause them to only remember the bits of information that confirm what they already thought.The confirmation bias influences people’s judgment and decision-making in many areas of life, so it’s important to understand it. As such, in the following article you will first learn more about the confirmation bias, and then see how you can reduce its influence, both in other people’s thought process as well as in your own.

Confirmation bias occurs when an individual looks for and uses the information to support their own ideas or beliefs. It also means that information not supporting their ideas or beliefs is disregarded. Confirmation bias often happens when we want certain ideas to be true. This leads individuals to stop gathering information when the retrieved evidence confirms their own viewpoints, which can lead to preconceived opinions (prejudices) that are not based on reason or factual knowledge. Individuals then pick out the bits of information that confirm their prejudices. Confirmation bias has a long history. In 1620, Francis Bacon described confirmation bias as: “Once a man’s understanding has settled on something (either because it is an accepted belief or because it pleases him), it draws everything else also to support and agree with it. And if it encounters a larger number of more powerful countervailing examples, it either fails to notice them, or disregards them, or makes fine distinctions to dismiss and reject them, and all this with much dangerous prejudice, to preserve the authority of its first Conceptions.” (Bacon 1620)

The impact of confirmation bias can be at the level of the individual all the way up to institution level. DuBroff showed that confirmation bias influenced expert guidelines on cholesterol and was highly prevalent when conflicts of interests were present (DuBroff 2017). He found that confirmation bias occurred due to a failure to incorporate evidence, or through misrepresentation of the evidence, which had the potential  to skew guideline recommendations

Humans tend to discount information that undermines past choices and judgments. This

confirmation bias has significant impact on domains ranging from politics to science and education. Little is known about the mechanisms underlying this fundamental characteristic of belief formation. Here we report a mechanism underlying the confirmation bias. Specifically, we provide evidence for a failure to use the strength of others’ disconfirming opinions to alter confidence in judgments, but adequate use when opinions are confirmatory. This bias is related to reduced neural sensitivity to the strength of others’ opinions in the posterior medial prefrontal cortex when opinions are disconfirming. Our results demonstrate that existing judgments alter the neural representation of information strength, leaving the individual less likely to alter opinions in the face of disagreement.

In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias (or confirmatory bias) is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, leading to statistical errors. Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of inductive inference toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study. Confirmation bias is a phenomenon wherein decision makers have been shown to actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms their hypothesis, and ignore or underweigh evidence that could disconfirm their hypothesis. As such, it can be thought of as a form of selection bias in collecting evidence.

Confirmation bias occurs from the direct influence of desire on beliefs. When people would like a certain idea or concept to be true, they end up believing it to be true. They are motivated by wishful thinking. This error leads the individual to stop gathering information when the evidence gathered so far confirms the views or prejudices one would like to be true.

Confirmation bias can also be found in anxious individuals, who view the world as dangerous. For example, a person with low self-esteem is highly sensitive to being ignored by other people, and they constantly monitor for signs that people might not like them. Thus, if you are worried that someone is annoyed with you, you are biased toward all the negative information about how that person acts toward you. You interpret neutral behavior as indicative of something negative.