The biased search for confirmation bias

Confirmation bias is the bias to seek for, interpret and remember information in ways that confirm our existing beliefs rather than genuinely test them. In general, it’s an irrational preference for information that matches our expectations. This is one of the first biases I learned about, but recently I’ve been reading up on it in [...]

World Health Organisation condemns homeopathy

Joyful news today on the BBC about a successful campaign for the charity Sense About Science. They asked the World Health Organisation to comment on the use of homeopathic treatment for diseases like HIV, malaria, TB and infant diarrhoea, and various WHO authorities have responded, stating in very clear terms that these conditions need to [...]

Book Review: Mistakes were Made (but not by Me)

Review of Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (2007) Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts. ISBN 978-0151010981 (Hardback), 978-1905177219 (Paperback)
For clear, engaging explanations of psychological research, this is one of the best books you can get. Cognitive biases are like optical illusions, distorting our [...]

Attribute substitution- a quick guide

Noticing that there wasn’t an article about this concept on Wikipedia, I’ve written the following and donated it to start off an article. The GNU Free Documentation license applies. (Updated 2 June. 20 hours after its creation, the article is the number four hit for its title on Google UK!)
Attribute Substitution is a psychological process [...]

Helping Simon Singh

I wasn’t at the London meeting last night, but here is the New Scientist write-up about Simon Singh’s libel case with the British Chiropractic Association (previously featured). It seems that this case is capturing the mood of the nation’s skeptics to an unexpected extent, just as the Atheist Bus campaign and Godless People events succeeded [...]

British Chiropractic Association promote bogus treatments

Along with a lot of other bloggers, I want to repost this quote from an article by Simon Singh:
The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is [...]

Book Review: Never Saw It Coming

Review of Karen A. Cerulo (2006) Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst. ISBN 9780226100333
This starts out so well, but wanders into such dubious and frankly mad territory that I can’t recommend it. The theme of the book is how we find it difficult to define or imagine the worst: in particular, [...]

Daily Mail campaigning both for and against vaccination

Via The Lay Scientist: Nauseating tabloid The Daily Mail publishes editions in both the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Like a lot of the UK press, it’s taking part in an irresponsible and anti-scientific campaign to deny people life-saving vaccines (the cervical cancer vaccine in this case), but the Irish edition is campaigning for [...]

Book Review: The Halo Effect

The Halo Effect: How managers let themselves be deceived by Phil Rosenzweig. ISBN: 978-1-84739-336-4
Business academic Rosenzweig has written a definitive book about critical thinking in the context of business success. A lot of people claim to understand why businesses succeed or fail, whether in journalism such as Fortune magazine, in bestselling books such as In [...]

New Scientist: Religious books masquerading as science

Hooray for the mighty Wikileaks, preserving for us the New Scientist article “How to spot a hidden religious agenda” that the magazine itself has taken off its web site for legal reasons.
The piece is important and deserves a wider discussion. The “science” shelves of a high street bookshop put outright pseudo-science right alongside popularisations of [...]