Confirmation Bias in Systems Engineering: A Pedagogical Example

Authors

Griselda Acosta, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Eric Smith, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Vladik Kreinovich, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow

Publication Date

8-2019

Comments

Technical Report: UTEP-CS-19-89

Abstract

One of the biases potentially affecting systems engineers is the confirmation bias, when instead of selecting the best hypothesis based on the data, people stick to the previously-selected hypothesis until it is disproved. In this paper, on a simple example, we show how important is to take care of this bias: namely, that because of this bias, we need twice as many experiments to switch to a better hypothesis.