wolfe-britt-metacognitive-argument-belief

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

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

Wolfe & Britt found that personal belief is not the source of myside bias; rather, a person's metacognitive belief about what constitutes a good argument (e.g., 'a good argument is fact-based') predicts the bias, and balanced-research instructions mitigate the effect.

Summary

Myside bias is not driven by what a person actually holds to be true, but by their internal standard for what counts as a strong argument, so changing that standard or requiring people to research both sides before judging is the effective lever for reducing bias. For the system, this means that nudging someone's conclusion will not fix evaluation skew; the intervention has to target the meta-criterion or the research structure.