An Operational Definition of Confirmation Bias

Today Huffington Post offers such an amazing (to me) example of confirmation bias, it might even qualify as "textbook".

It appears that Rush Limbaugh picked up a blog posting about someone "discovering" the first ten pages of Barack Obama's college thesis (on the inadequacies of the Constitution). He apparently saw plenty in it that burned him up (doesn't hardly take a match these days), and went on the air with it before he even finished reading. Too bad. If he had used the old "cortico-thalamic pause" from general semantics, he might have had time to note the tag "satire" on the original posting at the JumpinginPools blog before jumping to his predictable conclusion.

Instead he went into full rant mode as he read excerpts live on air, using these quotes to hammer on his perennial message that our current President hates America and wants to destroy it. In mid-sentence, you can hear him start to sputter as blog posts and twitters started to question the source and the validity of the story. Eventually, he grants that the post, and the alleged thesis, were indeed a hoax.

Did he retract his rant? ask for forgiveness for jumping the gun without a shred of vetting?

Oh sure he did. NOT.

Instead, he actually says that while Obama did not REALLY write this, "it feels real". Yeah, that's what confirmation bias is all about. The facts don't determine your evaluation, your gut does, even in the face of direct contradiction.

Rush decided that Obama COULD have written this and therefore, he might as well have, and therefore, well, it FEELS like he must have, and therefore, oh look, it's true, at least, true enough for current purposes. Limbaugh will continue to hold the notions in this satirical "thesis" against Obama AS-IF he wrote it, even if he knows perfectly well he did not.

The word determined the facts and not the other way 'round--how NOT to apply cognitive accuracy to your thinking and behaving.