William G. Pullin

Greetings. Confirmation Bias. Confirmation bias is the human tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior belief structures or personal values. People openly display confirmation bias when they select information that supports their own views, ignoring valid and contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? A series of psychological experiments conducted back in the 1960s strongly suggested that people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs. A logical conclusion to say the least. Later work re-interpreted these results as a tendency to test ideas in a biased, one-sided manner, focusing on one possibility and ignoring all other alternatives. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking a...

Greetings. UFOs. Magical thinking. A connection? Magical thinking is the belief that unrelated events are causally connected despite the total absence of any plausible causal link between them, particularly as a result of unlikely, non-mundane, supernatural effects. Some examples include the idea that personal thoughts can influence the physical world without directly acting on it, or that objects must be causally connected if they resemble each other or have come into some form of contact with each other in the past. Magical thinking is a common type of fallacious thinking and is a source of invalid causal inferences. Unlike the confusion of correlation with causation, magical thinking does not require the events to be correlated. The precise definition of magical thinking varies by degrees when used by different theorists or among different fields of study. In psychology, magical thinking is the belief that one's thoughts by themselves can bring about effects in the world or that...