1. Confirmation Bias: A Methodology of Social Science
梁冰玉

2. Outline 1.Experiment 2.Analysis of the experiment 3.Confirmation bias
4.Reasons of confirmation bias
5.Conclusion
Here's my outline. Let's begin with a psychological experiment and the next step will be an analysis of the experiment. Then I'll introduce the definition of "Confirmation Bias" and explain why so many people have this bia.

3. Wason Selection Task----An Experiment
Here are four cards and each of them has a letter on one side and a number on the other side. E K 4 7
Hypothesis: If there is a vowel on one side of the card, there must be an even number on the other side.
To examine whether this hypothesis is true, which card(s) do you have to turn ?
Let's start with an experiment.

4. Wason Selection Task: A Logic Puzzle
Keywords:
1.Logic puzzle
2.Deductive reasoning
3.Applied to many fields
This experiment is called"Wason Selection Task",which is a logic puzzle designed by a cognitive scientist called Pter Wason in It is one of the most famous tasks in the study of deductive reasoning.

5. Results of Wason Selection Task
People who made the right selection only account for 4%
E,4,7
(34%)
E,4
(44%)
Why do they make the wrong choices?
E 11%
Now let's have a look at the results of this logical puzzle.
The answer may be the "Confirmation Bias"
Other Answers 7%

6. Confirmation Bias——"people tend to believe what they believe"
"The Internal "yes man"
"People tend to believe Confirmation bias has been described as an internal "yes man", echoing back a person's beliefs like Charles Dickens' character Uriah Heep.
Why do so many people make the wrong decision?
Confirmation bias is the tendency for people to only seek out information that conforms to their pre-existing view points, and subsequently ignore information that goes against them. It is a type of cognitive bias and a form of selection bias toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study. Avoiding confirmation bias is an important part of rationalism and in science in general. This is achieved by setting up problems so that you must find ways of disproving your hypothesis (see falsifiability).
The "Yes man"

7. Why Confirmation Bias?
1.Confirming is easier and more effective than falsifying.
2.Confirmation is beneficial during human evolution
How to apply these conclusions into the discussion of methodology in social science?
We can see that in this case, most people tend to confirmation rather than falsification. However, it can not arbitrarily attributed to the lack of “critique thinking”. According to researches , there are two main reasons explaining this phenomenon.
Confirmation is more effective than falsification. In the Wason Selection Task, it only takes less steps to confirm while falsify.
Confirmation is more beneficial in the process of evolution according to the evolutionary psychology. In fact, people do not naturally think like scientists and most people are really bad at simple logic. Perhaps this is because our minds work mainly ny simple association of positive instances. According to the evolutionary psychology, people are naturally good at detecting cheaters, because this is an essential adaptation for the reciprocal altruism that is at the foundation of hominid social organization. People are not nearly as good at general hypothesis testing, because there has never been any similar selective urgency----our ancestors did not compete for mates by solving physics problem sets----but there may well be other adaptations for reasoning about other specific sorts of things.

8. Methodology In Social Science
1. Contemplative rather than derivative
2. Case Study rather than Casual Analysis
3. Practical rather than Transcendental
All senseful behaviour are the results of people’s adhere to principles. As a result, the key point of sociology is to research the principles of human behaviour rather than the casual analysis mode which is widely used in natural science. The standard of explaining human behaviour derives from human themselves. We can not impose the eternal standard on them. In order to solve problems of concepts and theories, we have to turn to human’s reality life.

9. Methodology In Social Science
“One would be strangely mistaken about our thought if he drew the conclusion that sociology, according to us, must, or even can, make an abstraction of man and his faculties.”
Emile Durkheim
“The only antecedents of historical phenomena are historical phenomena.”
Alfred Kroeber

10. A Humanistic and Practical turn
“To be radical is to go to the root of the matter. For man, the root is man himself.”
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1843