For the sake of clarity, would you mind if we focus on the availability heuristic and hash out the wason selection task sometime after. I have no intention of dodging that subject.
Lets look at another example of the availability heuristic. This is one taught to students as an example of the phenomenon. I'm curious if you also see this as confirmation bias.
"In the last few months I have seen nearly a dozen reports of people being attacked by sharks while swimming. I'm not going near the beach this year."
If we see lots of shark attacks in the news, we may get the idea that sharks are out of control and avoid going to the beach. This is a classic example of the availability heuristic. This is due to the frequency with which we have seen the example (the news loves to report shark attacks). The more we see it, the easier it comes to mind. However, vividness of an example has also been shown to make the example more available. So, the same aversion of beaches can be triggered if we have just watched the movie Jaws. We are, essentially, misjudging the statistical likelihood of being attacked by a shark. In my example, we have misjudged the likelihood of there being a serial killer outside. We have not confirmed any prior belief. The idea didn't exist until we heard the noise. (
https://visualbloke.wordpress.com/2012/02/11/sharks-and-the-availability-bias/)
The wiki page on this heuristic sums up and gives references to the research behind both frequency and vividness being factors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
"In general, availability is correlated with ecological frequency, but it is also affected by other factors. Consequently, the reliance on the availability heuristic leads to systematic biases. Such biases are demonstrated in the judged frequency of classes of words, of combinatorial outcomes, and of repeated events. The phenomenon of illusory correlation is explained as an availability bias."
"Two studies with 108 undergraduates investigated vivid information and its impact on social judgment and the availability heuristic and its role in mediating vividness effects. . .Such effects have typically been attributed to the ready accessibility of vividly presented information in memory—that is, to the availability heuristic. In both studies, vividness affected both availability (ability to recall) and judgments. However, causal modeling results indicated that the availability heuristic did not play a role in the (social) judgment process."
The availability heuristic is often confused with confirmation bias. It's not a new thing, or something that is just occurring between the two of us.
Here is another cognitive phenomenon that is often confused with confirmation bias.
'Have you ever had a conversation in which some old movie was mentioned, something like “The Golden Child” or maybe even something more obscure?
You are flipping channels one night and all of the sudden you see “The Golden Child” is playing. Weird. The next day you are reading a news story, and out of nowhere it mentions forgotten movies from the 1980s, and holy shit, three paragraphs about “The Golden Child.” You see a trailer that night at the theater for a new Eddie Murphy movie, and then you see a billboard on the street promoting Charlie Murphy doing stand-up in town, and then one of your friends sends you a link to a post at TMZ showing recent photos of the actress from “The Golden Child.” Is the universe trying to tell you something?'
This sounds very much like confirmation bias, and no doubt that some of the same mental mechanics are at play (selective attention, pattern recognition, ect), however, what would we be confirming? This is known as the frequency illusion. Again, the main difference is the active pursuit of truth. The frequency illusion can give rise to false ideas, but until we have those ideas, there is nothing to confirm.
I am defending the example based on what I have been taught and how I understand biases. I may be wrong of course, but I am not being stubborn. What you have offered so far has not convinced me that I'm wrong, and, to be respectfully frank, what you have offered seems to be somewhat of a misconception of biases. For example, there is no "reason tree" to biases. They come intuitively. They can, of course, immediately be backed up by fallacious logic, but the logical mistakes are separate from the biases.
What I have tried to show is that there are distinctions between the availability heuristic and confirmation bias, and those distinctions are not simply shrewd attempts by me to save face. They are recognized by researchers and professors in the field of cognition. The availability heuristic involves estimating the frequencies of events on the basis of how easily we can call to mind what we perceive as relevant information of a phenomenon, and confirmation bias is when we seek or interpret information based on prior belief.
What you have not shown is what belief existed prior to hearing the noise. What did the noise confirm? Why, when we hear a noise while watching something innocuous, like a nature documentary or American Idol, do we suspect animals (or neighbors, or something that actually is likely) rather than a serial killer?
