Comment by notabel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notabel | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Yes, actually, there is a word for that--sort of. It is essentially a special case of confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is a concept from cognitive psychology; basically, the human mind heuristically prefers data which support (confirm) its nascent inferences. In this case, the inference being developed is roughly the importance/prevalence of the word.

So, there isn't a word for this precise phenomenon (to my knowledge), but you're welcome to coin one. If there's one thing cognitive psychology loves, it's terminology. (Don't get me wrong, cognitive psych is delightful, but it loves its lingo.)

N.B. Related phenomena are the cocktail party effect, and, in the large, figure-ground phenomena, and selection bias. EDIT: And priming. Thanks to python_kiss. (Wikipedia has decent articles on these things, but if you're really interested, go to the library and get a good psych book.)

+1 for the explanation. "Priming" is another term that describes this phenomenon. From wikipedia: Priming in psychology refers to activating parts of particular representations or associations in memory just before carrying out an action or task. In a neurological view priming can be seen as the activation of clusters of neurons. An interconnected cluster is surrounded by other clusters that are more or less connected with each other...So when the cluster that represents the concept of "flower" is activated, particular clusters will be more activated then others (i.e. kinds of flowers).

Thank you! I had the nagging feeling that there was a more precise bit of terminology that I was missing. You've gotten it off the tip of my tongue. As you pointed out, though, priming properly refers immediate-time phenomena. Whereas priming arises from manipulation of operational memory, confirmation bias arises from deeper heuristic phenomena.

I have trouble with reverse confirmation bias. I miss actual trends because I pass them off as confirmation bias. For example, "I'm probably just noticing Alex's posts everywhere because I met him at startup school". And then I counted them. "Oh."

\begin{ego}Welcome to the wonderful world of the learned.\end{ego} Seriously, though, I've had problems like this ever since I started studying psychology--self examination can be risky!

Ultimately, while the human mind is excellent at fuzzy inference, it's not perfect, and augmenting inductive inference with declarative rules often just swings the error to the other side, as you observed: confirmation bias + knowledge of confirmation bias - reverse confirmation bias. If you want /real/ self-examination, do what you did: quantify it!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com