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Category: Project

Description: It is well established that people tend to favor confirming strategies in hypothesis testing. However, little is known about individual differences in this topic. The present study has two aims: (a) adapting existing experimental tasks on hypothesis testing to measure individual differences, (b) investigating the convergent and discriminant properties of these measures within a multitrait–multimethod framework using a confirmatory factor analysis approach. Participants (N = 200) completed a total of nine behavioral tasks: three tasks (two rule hypothesis testing tasks and a trait hypothesis testing task) measuring three aspects of confirmation bias in information processing (information search, weighing of evidence, memory recall). Scores to most tasks reached satisfactory levels of internal consistency, showing that individual differences in confirmation bias can be reliably measured. The multitrait–multimethod analyses provided moderate evidence for the convergent validity and small to moderate evidence for the discriminant validity of the measures. These findings reveal that confirmation bias is a more unified phenomenon than what has been suggested.