wason-coined-confirmation-bias-1960

IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/wiki-Confirmation_bias-chunk-2.md

Created 2026-08-25T02:58:45+00:00

Peter Wason introduced the term 'confirmation bias' in 1960 following his rule-discovery experiments in which participants were given the example (2,4,6) and the true rule was 'any ascending sequence.'

Summary

Peter Wason is the person who first named and demonstrated confirmation bias — the natural human tendency to hunt for examples that support your current guess while ignoring examples that could disprove it. This matters because it grounds the term in a specific, replicable experimental setup and shows the flaw is a structural feature of how people test hypotheses, not just an occasional lapse.