Increased Attention and Effect of Comprehension Check on Confirmation Bias with Belief-confirming Evidence

Confirmation bias refers to the cognitive tendency to seek, interpret, and favor information that aligns with one’s pre-existing beliefs, while giving less consideration to evidence that challenges those beliefs. While confirmation bias has been widely studied in various contexts, little is known about how increased attentiveness might influence biased information interpretation. To address this gap, we investigated the impact of attentiveness on confirmation bias, defined here as the tendency to evaluate belief-confirming arguments as more convincing than belief-disconfirming ones. We tested in an experiment whether focusing participants’ attention through comprehension testing would reduce their bias when evaluating economic arguments for and against raising the minimum wage. Our findings showed that increased attentiveness marginally reduced the convincingness of belief-confirming arguments, while having no effect on disconfirming arguments, suggesting a modest decrease in overall confirmation bias.