What is it about?
This study examines a prominent bias in human reasoning: myside bias. Myside bias is the tendency to favor information supporting our beliefs and undermining information against what we believe. The study answers the questions of in which contexts we are biased and how this bias changes with age.
Featured Image
Photo by Pieter on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Understanding when we are most prone to myside bias and how it changes with age helps us understand its functions, boundaries, and ontogeny, which allow us to target domains and age groups where it has negative consequences for individuals and groups such as belief-updating failures, echo-chambers, and polarization. Our study showed that we are biased even for arbitrarily made decisions in argumentative contexts; however, we are not biased when our aim is to learn whether we made a correct decision. So, we can be debiased. We also showed that the bias increases with age in argumentative contexts, while it is stable in learning contexts.
Perspectives
The study shows that although myside bias is an influential bias in human reasoning from early on, even for arbitrarily made decisions, its presence and degree depend on the context. When we aim to convince someone later, we seek information in a biased manner. On the other hand, when we try to understand whether we made a correct decision, we are not biased. The study also shows how people's information-seeking strategies change from age 5 to 55 across different contexts.
F. Ece Özkan
University of Toronto
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The boundaries and ontogeny of myside bias., Journal of Experimental Psychology General, April 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/xge0001932.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
