Exercise 3: Recognizing Confirmation Bias in Practice — Possible Solution
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This exercise has no single correct situation to describe - the point
is honestly applying Wason's own real 2-4-6 task pattern to a genuine
example, then identifying what a resistant version would have looked
like.

A worked example, using a common situation ("deciding whether to buy a
specific product after reading reviews"):

THE CONFIRMATION-BIASED VERSION: After already leaning toward a
purchase, searching specifically for positive reviews, reading only
the first few results that praised the product, and stopping the
search once enough favorable opinions were found - mirroring Wason's
own participants, who tested only triples that would confirm their
initial guess rather than ones that could disprove it.

THE RESISTANT VERSION: Deliberately searching for negative reviews and
common complaints specifically, not just positive ones; reading at
least as many critical reviews as favorable ones before deciding;
and treating a genuinely disconfirming pattern (e.g. a recurring
specific complaint across many reviewers) as real evidence worth
weighing, rather than dismissing it because it didn't match the
initial expectation.

The general principle, matching the chapter's own tip-box: a
confirmation-bias-resistant search actively looks for the kind of
evidence that could prove the initial belief wrong, not just more of
the kind that already agrees with it.

ANSWER: (worked example) The biased version stopped searching once
enough agreeing opinions were found; the resistant version would have
deliberately sought out disagreeing evidence (negative reviews,
recurring complaints) with the same effort as the agreeing evidence,
and treated a genuine disconfirming pattern as real information rather
than something to explain away.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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This models the reasoning pattern the exercise asked for - describing
a real confirmation-bias situation and then a genuinely resistant
alternative - which the reader can then apply to their own specific
example.