Confirmation Bias and Art

By now, our overwhelming tendency to look for what confirms our beliefs and ignore what contradicts our beliefs is well documented. Psychologists refer to this as confirmation bias, and its ubiquity is observed in both academia and in our everyday lives: Republicans watch Fox while Democrats watch MSNB; creationists see fossils as evidence of God, evolutionary biologists see fossils as evidence of evolution; doomsayers see signs of the end of the world, and the rest of us see just another day. Simply put, our ideologies and personal dogmas dictate our realities.
For the most part, confirmation bias has been studied by psychologists and discussed by science journalists in the context of decision-making or reasoning. Examples of this include Jonah Lehrer 's How We Decide, Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made , and the recent Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber article (pdf) that has garnered so much popularity. As more is written about confirmation bias and its effects, it is becoming clear that it is describing something much more than a mechanism that influences our everyday choices and rationality.   link