Raymond S. Nickerson, “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises“, in Review of General Psychology, Vol. 2, No. 2, June 1998, pp. 175-220.

A survey and evaluation of the normative significance of the psychological literature.

Jack Beatty, “Cognitive Dissonance“, in The Atlantic, 24 July 2007.

An editorial on the role of Fox News in supporting the sorts of highly unusual poll results I discussed.

Peter Carruthers, “Review of Without Good Reason: The Rationality Debate in Philosophy and Cognitive Science by Edward Stein and Rationality and Reasoning by Jonathan St. B. T. Evans and David E. Over”, in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 49, No. 1, March 1998, pp. 189-193.

An interesting review of two books examining the significance of the psychological research for philosophical views about rationality.

“Cognitive Dissonance, Confirmation Bias, And Philosophy“, in On Philosophy, 11 July 2007.

An informal but long and interesting weblog post expressing scepticism about the implications of the psychological research for philosophy itself as a discipline.

There is a known bias where people tend to interpret evidence in light of their own previously established beliefs. It’s known as the confirmation bias. Given some observation, people tend to square it with some belief they have, or they attribute its cause to some belief they have. I think what Kelly says in the abstract sort of illustrates this. And it also has to do with what you point out in your theory.

Mark – “can’t this be seen as a good thing?” one problem might be, if you settle for a bad answer, you’ll be more likely to resist evidence for a better answer, when it comes.

“My thought though is that someone making the judgments you are suggesting would have to be completely ignorant of the long and rich history of black American Christianity, in order to weigh the chances of Obama being Muslim so highly.”

Yea. I don’t think most Americans associate being black with being Muslim. If anything, it would be with being Christian. Other factors may be at work, but the name alone seems enough to explain the 7 percent.

Feyerabend certainly celebrated our ability to creatively generate myriad explanations and thought we were typically too quick to suppress rivals. I’m not so sure he would have endorsed our preference for weak totalising explanations over strong partial ones.

While it is true that more black Americans than white Americans are Muslim, it is also true that more black Americans than white Americans are Christian. I’d be interested to see the actual figures here, which I can’t find on a completely cursory glance, but I would be very surprised if the actual percentage of Muslims among black Americans were more than 5%. I don’t know though what sort of comparison you had in mind when you said that “many black Americans are Muslim”. My thought though is that someone making the judgements you are suggesting would have to be completely ignorant of the long and rich history of black American Christianity, in order to weigh the chances of Obama being Muslim so highly.

The media coverage point and the fact that his father was born a Muslim are interesting, and both news to me, or at least I had forgotten the second. To the extent the first is right, this would go a long way to explaining the 7 percent. But then my perplexity simply extends to the media.

Regarding Obama, well, and you get to this point at the end, his name sounds like the Muslim/Arab name Osama. And what you don’t mention is that widely-attended-to sections of the Amerikan media have been putting this incidental fact at the forefront of their coverage of Obama’s presidential bid since the get-go. There is more circumstantial data that I think makes it a not-so-crazy assumption. Firstly, many black Americans are Muslim; Amerikans I think tend to associate being black with being Muslim. Of course, Obama isn’t black, but certainly paints himself as such. He has joined a black church, which may be tantamount to being Muslim in some Amerikans’ eyes. Let’s throw in some more information: Barack Obama has a funny name, like Muslims. Let’s throw in the fact that Barack Obama’s father, from whom Barack gets his name, was himself born a Muslim. Reading this post, I was obviously immediately implicitly informed that Obama wasn’t a Muslim – but I actually found myself wondering if you weren’t wrong. Then I realised I was getting Obama confused with the Muslim senator from Detroit, Keith Ellison, a black Muslim convert whose name doesn’t sound Muslim.