When someone says something that confirms my preexisting beliefs (eg ‘coyotes live in this area, but not polar bears’), I believe it. If that same person provides the same evidence for something that challenges my preexisting beliefs, I reject it.
Is this confirmation bias?
Not as far as I know. Wikipedia gives three aspects of confirmation bias:
Biased search: seeking out stories about coyotes but not polar bears.
Biased interpretation: hearing an unknown animal rustle in the bushes, and treating that as additional evidence that coyotes outnumber polar bears.
Biased recall: remembering coyote encounters more readily than polar bear encounters.
All of those seem different from your example, and none are valid Bayesian reasoning.
Some forms of biased recall are Bayesian. This is because “recall” is actually a process of reconstruction from noisy data, so naturally priors play a role.
Here’s a fun experiment showing how people’s priors on fruit size (pineapples > apples > raspberries …) influenced their recollection of synthetic images where the sizes were manipulated: A Bayesian Account of Reconstructive Memory
I think this framework captures about half of the examples of biased recall mentioned in the Wikipedia article.
Not as far as I know. Wikipedia gives three aspects of confirmation bias:
Biased search: seeking out stories about coyotes but not polar bears.
Biased interpretation: hearing an unknown animal rustle in the bushes, and treating that as additional evidence that coyotes outnumber polar bears.
Biased recall: remembering coyote encounters more readily than polar bear encounters.
All of those seem different from your example, and none are valid Bayesian reasoning.
Some forms of biased recall are Bayesian. This is because “recall” is actually a process of reconstruction from noisy data, so naturally priors play a role.
Here’s a fun experiment showing how people’s priors on fruit size (pineapples > apples > raspberries …) influenced their recollection of synthetic images where the sizes were manipulated: A Bayesian Account of Reconstructive Memory
I think this framework captures about half of the examples of biased recall mentioned in the Wikipedia article.