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Gary Charness, Ryan Oprea, Sevgi Yuksel, How do People Choose Between Biased Information Sources? Evidence from a Laboratory Experiment, Journal of the European Economic Association, Volume 19, Issue 3, June 2021, Pages 1656–1691, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvaa051
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Abstract
People in our experiment choose between two information sources with opposing biases in order to inform their guesses about a binary state. By varying the nature of the bias, we vary whether it is optimal to consult information sources biased towards or against prior beliefs. Even in our deliberately-abstract setting, there is strong evidence of confirmation-seeking and to a lesser extent contradiction-seeking heuristics leading people to choose information sources biased towards or against their priors. Analysis of post-experiment survey questions suggests that subjects follow these rules due to fundamental errors in reasoning about the relative informativeness of biased information sources.