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Concept
Congruence bias
Summary
Congruence bias is the tendency of people to over-rely on testing their initial hypothesis (the most congruent one) while neglecting to test alternative hypotheses. That is, people rarely try experiments that could disprove their initial belief, but rather try to repeat their initial results. It is a special case of the confirmation bias.
Suppose that, in an experimental setting, a subject is presented with two buttons and told that pressing one of those buttons, but not the other, will open a door. The subject adopts the hypothesis that the button on the left opens the door in question. A direct test of this hypothesis would be pressing the button on the left; an indirect test would be pressing the button on the right. The latter is still a valid test because once the result of the door's remaining closed is found, the left button is proven to be the desired button. (This example is parallel to Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin's example in the psychology classic, A Study of Thinking.)
It is possible to apply this idea of direct and indirect testing to more complicated experiments in order to explain the presence of a congruence bias in people's reasonning. Congruence bias could be said to be present if a subject tests their own (usually naive) hypothesis again and again instead of trying to disprove it.
The classic example of subjects' congruence bias was discovered by Peter Wason (1960, 1968). Here, the experimenter gave subjects the number sequence "2, 4, 6", telling the subjects that this sequence followed a particular rule and instructing subjects to find the rule underlying the sequence logic. Subjects provide their own number sequences as tests to see if they could ascertain the rule dictating which numbers could be included in the sequence and which could not. Most subjects quickly assumed that the underlying rule is "numbers ascending by 2", and provide as tests only sequences concordant with this rule, such as "8, 10, 12" or "3, 5, 7" (direct testing). The experimenter would confirm that these sequences are in compliance with the rule they were thinking of.
Official source
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