Wikipedia:Peer review/Confirmation bias/archive1

Confirmation bias

This peer review discussion has been closed.
Having substantially rewritten this article and, with help from the community, got it to Good Article status, I'd like to take it onwards to Featured Article. Any help that pushes the article towards this goal is appreciated. Thanks, MartinPoulter (talk) 14:11, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: I think this is nearly ready for FAC. It's fascinating, professionally written, well-illustrated, well-organized, neutral, stable, and supported by reliable sources. I have a small number of suggestions, none of which will take much time to address.

Lead

• "Confirmation bias (or myside bias[1])" - I would move the ref outside of the end parentheses.
• "(when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false)[10]," - I'd move this ref to the other side of the comma.
• "their preconceptions or hypotheses" - I would consider linking to hypothesis. It's a borderline call, but readers might like a quick refresher in the meaning of the word.

Biased search for information

• "They look for the evidence that they would expect to see if their hypothesis was true, neglecting what would happen if it were false." - "Were true" rather than "was true"?
• "someone who is trying to identify a number using yes/no questions and suspects that the number is 3 would ask a... " - "Might ask" rather than "would ask"?
• "Even a small change in the wording of a question can affect how someone searches through the available information, and hence, the conclusion they come to." - S-v disagreement between "someone" and "they". Maybe "... can affect how people search through the available information, and hence, their answers"?
• "Subjects preferred to ask the more informative questions, showing only a weak bias towards positive tests." - Perhaps this could be made a little more clear. "More informative" might be misunderstood. Would "less presumptive" be better?

Biased interpretation

• "the subjects made their judgements while in an Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner" - "a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner" rather than "an"? Also, you spell "judgment" without a "e" after the "g" later in the article; I'd change this one to "judgments" for consistency.
• If the entire paragraphs in which citation 26 appears are supported by the citation, it would be better to put it at the end of the final sentence of each paragraph. Otherwise, the later claims in the paragraphs appear to be unsupported by something satisfying WP:RS.
• "In another experiment, subjects were told a story about a theft." - Nothing wrong here, but it reminded me of grand jury proceedings during which the jurors hear mainly or only what the prosecution has to say.

Illusory association between events

• "Another study recorded the symptoms experienced by arthritic patients, along with weather conditions over a fifteen month period." - Digits for numbers bigger than 9? Hyphen as well, thus: "15-month period"?

Informal observation

• The Manual of Style suggests using blockquotes for quotes of four lines or longer but not for quotes as short as the one from Thucydides. On the other hand, the Francis Bacon image already overlaps two sections, and this is a layout no-no. (At least it does this on my computer screen, not necessarily on all computer screens). A solution to both problems might be to move the second Bacon quote from the caption into the main text; this would allow you to make the Thucydides quote into a regular quotation within the text without making the image-fit problem worse. It's also possible to reduce the Bacon image by adding an |upright parameter after the |thumb parameter in the image template, but that alone won't solve the layout problem. (I tried it). The revised Bacon caption might just say "Francis Bacon".

Explanations

• "For instance, someone who underestimates a friend's honesty might treat them suspiciously and so undermine the friendship." - Probably a "her or him" in place of "them" would fix the s-v disagreement here between "friend" and "them".

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog at WP:PR. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 23:36, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks Finetooth. Your favourable review made my day, and I've implemented all your suggestions.

With respect to the "less presumptive" suggestion under Biased search for information, "less presumptive" would be incorrect in this context: subjects asked questions whose answers could be expected to yielded meaningful information, rather than those that were loaded towards a particular answer. The word used by the source is "diagnostic", but I wanted to avoid that because it may be a confusing technical term. I've replaced "informative" with "diagnostic" in the article. Is this okay, or does "diagnostic" need explaining?

Re-reading it again just now with "diagnostic" in place of "informative", it seems clear. Finetooth (talk) 01:59, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm already involved in peer review of the Nobel prize article. Thanks again. MartinPoulter (talk) 18:56, 24 May 2010 (UTC)