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

经济学博士论文研究：确认偏差的实验研究

• 批准号: 2214913
• 负责人: Emel Filiz Ozbay
• 金额: $ 1.93万
• 依托单位: University of Maryland, College Park
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-08-01 至 2024-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2214913&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Economics; Experimental

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.

事实证明，当他们吸收信息时，它们远非客观。随着各种媒体和社交媒体平台已经在我们的日常生活中深入融合，了解人们如何真正对新信息做出反应变得比以往任何时候都变得更加重要。确认偏见是指支持某个假设的证据的有偏见，并且在人们的信息解释过程中起着影响力。但是，由于最近的实证研究如何触发确认偏见以及它如何影响人们的信念，因此确认偏见尚未完全理解为最近实证研究产生了不同的证据。这项研究将调查并提供更多有关确认偏见如何影响个人在向概率事件提出信息的信念的能力的能力。这项研究的结果将有助于决策者设计最佳政策，以帮助人们形成正确的信念，并防止信息源操纵人们的信念。确认偏见有两种形式：动机确认偏见，它是指通过潜在偏好激励的信息处理的偏见处理，而无需动机的确认偏见，这是指对信息的有偏见处理，仅仅是因为个人认为她的假设比其他人更可能是真实的。这项研究将是最早利用受控实验室实验的人之一，并研究两种形式的确认偏见之间的潜在关系和相互作用。对偏见的识别在于引起实验主体对概率事件的信念，用二元评分规则激励，并衡量他们脱离贝叶斯后义信仰的出发。两种形式的确认偏见的分离取决于改变动机的治疗变量。这项研究连接了引起越来越多的关注的两个主题 - 确认偏见和混合推理。此外，这项研究将测试基于理论的新框架进行分析确认BIA的有效性。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并通过使用基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛的影响评估标准来评估，被认为是宝贵的支持。