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Reasoning error · perception patterns
Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek, notice, remember or interpret information in ways that reinforce an existing belief, while applying less attention or stricter standards to disconfirming evidence.
Explore connections →A claim can feel repeatedly confirmed when broad symptoms, flexible tests or selected examples are interpreted through the same prior belief.
The practical safeguard is not to demand that people become belief-free. It is to make the update rule explicit: identify what evidence would count against the explanation, seek credible contrary cases with the same effort used to find supporting cases, and apply comparable quality standards in both directions.
Research basis
Foundational review describing confirmation bias across information search, interpretation and hypothesis testing, while discussing several possible explanations.
Meta-analysis finding a moderate preference for attitude-consistent information, with the size of selective exposure shaped by defensive and accuracy motivations.
Investigation ↔ Learn
The famous shapes at the Temple of Seti I are produced by two superimposed royal inscriptions: an earlier Seti I text was plastered over and recarved for Ramesses II, then both layers became visible as the fill deteriorated. The aircraft resemblance is an accidental palimpsest, not intentional vehicle iconography.
Some placebo-controlled homeopathy trials and meta-analyses show positive statistical signals. But their heterogeneous conditions, methodological uncertainty and lack of dependable indication-specific replication do not establish clinically meaningful effects of the remedies themselves. A 2024 independent evidence assessment found only low-certainty signals for two particular outcomes. The affirmative treatment claim remains unsupported.
Controlled diagnostic studies repeatedly find iridology performs at or near chance, and a recent government-commissioned evidence review found low-certainty evidence that manual iridology cannot accurately distinguish several tested diseases. Genuine ocular signs of systemic disease do not validate iridology's organ maps.
Fatigue, poor sleep and stress-related symptoms are real, but systematic review and endocrine guidance do not support 'adrenal fatigue' as a validated diagnosis or show that ordinary chronic stress exhausts otherwise normal adrenal glands. Recognized adrenal insufficiency is a different condition with defined causes and diagnostic tests.
People reporting electromagnetic hypersensitivity can experience real and sometimes disabling symptoms. The causal question is separate: blinded provocation studies have generally not found that participants can detect actual RF exposure better than chance or that below-limit exposure reliably produces more symptoms than sham exposure. The strongest recent systematic review addresses mainly acute exposure and does not settle every possible long-term hypothesis.