ditto-lopez-1992-motivated-skepticism

IN premisesummaries/2026/08/24/wiki-Confirmation_bias-chunk-5.md

Created 2026-08-25T02:58:47+00:00

Ditto & Lopez (1992) demonstrated motivated skepticism: people apply stricter evidential standards to arguments they dislike versus those they already favor.

Summary

Human judgment isn't a neutral evidence processor: people set a much higher bar for proof against a position they already hold than for proof supporting one. This means any system modeling how people update their opinions has to account for that built-in asymmetry rather than assuming a single uniform standard for what counts as convincing.