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Comment by ElViajero | Hacker News Reader

> Elementary school children significantly increased their exploration of the dolls when their intuitions had been contradicted as compared to when they had been confirmed, frequently picking up the smallest and the biggest doll concurrently to compare their relative weight—a direct test of the claim they had been given. Preschool children rarely engaged in this behavior, whether their intuitions had been confirmed or contradicted.

Interesting study. Good to make clear that this does not apply to older children. Older children will verify any surprising claims. On the other hand they suffer, like adults, of confirmation bias. If the information fits their expectation they will not check is veracity. I guess that confirmation bias is just an efficient way of learning about the world, do not waste time if things seem to fit your current understanding of the world.

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To see a creature with not enough confirmation bias watch a horse if it encounters something even slightly usual. It will shy away and or investigate or refuse to move until you have investigated the slightly oddly positioned leaf on the path.

If we did indeed check everything we nevertheless expected to be as usual we’d never get anything done and would get stuck in mega loops.

To hilarious effect with regard to llama competitions at the state fair. Very serious twelve year olds (god bless ‘em) leading their llamas through a rigorous course of “touch your nose to a mirror of death”, “walk the gauntlet of pool noodles”, “step across the tinfoil floor of doom”, “remain calm under the umbrella’s predatory gaze”.

Horses spooked by unexpected street markings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMyf6ewi7E8

...and this is why road markings have legal standards in many countries.

Interesting. Cows won't step over painted parallel lines if they have encountered a cattle guard before.

Where a cattle guard is parallel pipes in the road at a gate opening meant to keep them in...their hooves can't negotiate the spaces between the pipes.

Real one: https://www.conteches.com/Portals/0/Images/US%20Forest%20Gri...

Painted one: https://i.stack.imgur.com/gT5vU.jpg

The painted one is sorta funny, such a low tech solution. I recently came across this interesting tidbit: "Cattle grids are generally useless for containing goats. However, a Texas Highway Department official reported that adding three 20-inch (51 cm) painted stripes—arranged yellow, white, yellow—on the road in front of a cattle grid deterred goats from approaching or crossing the guard."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_grid

My brother did civil war reenacting pretty seriously (he had a bit part as a union soldier running across the battlefield and getting shot dead in the film Gettysburg, among other things) and he told me that a horse would get spooked by a coffee mug if it hadn't seen one before.

It gives you a whole new appreciation for HEMA and what it took to train destriers.

I guess the utility of a novel thing to a herd, prey, plains animal is mostly likely about zero. The danger of the thing is higher.

Horses also need to be desensitized to new objects twice: once on their right eye and once for their left.

That is an interesting observation. As prey rather than predator, however, a horse’s response has, more or less, been validated by the survival of the genus.

I would guess that a wild horse or mustang would not be frozen in place by such things, suggesting, perhaps, that domestication has created a conflict between instincts, which is sub-optimal for its rider, but not necessarily for the horse.

With regard to the general point about checking everything, you are correct, and it takes a certain amount of judgement to doubt one’s intuitions without being paralyzed by doing so.

Mustangs behave pretty much the same as other horses when confronted with something scary. They're not really any different to work with than any other unhandled horse. Mustangs are not wild horses, btw. They're feral horses descended largely from the horses of the Conquistadors.

So much for my guess! BTW I am well aware that mustangs are not wild horses, which is precisely why I made the distinction in my original comment. When you say "any other unhandled horses", are you including truly wild horses?

There arguably aren't truly wild horses anymore. The closest, Przewalski's horse, only exist in the wild as a population reintroduced from captivity. The captive population that they were reintroduced from very might well have been a more docile subset of the subspecies, making your question difficult to answer.

> I guess that confirmation bias is just an efficient way of learning about the world, do not waste time if things seem to fit your current understanding of the world.

Interesting observation - in this light, confirmation bias could almost be considered a variant of Occam's razor.

yep, that's the simplest explanation.

Check lists of other acknowledged biases, such as putting too much weight on earlier presented information

Occam's razor is a variant of confirmation bias.

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