Confirmation-seeking bias appears across many domains, not just artificial laboratory tasks.

Evidence

By itself, a study such as Wason’s might be dismissed on the grounds that it represents a fairly artificial laboratory task in which the subjects have little interest, but similar failures to seek disconfirmation have been observed in a number of different spheres. For example, Mitroff (1974) indicates that NASA scientists have a strong confirmation-seeking bias in their work, and Mynatt, Doherty and Tweeney (1977) report a similar bias amongst subjects attempting to discover the laws of an artificial universe simulated on a computer. Snyder and Swann (1978) conclude that subjects seek evidence of extroverted behaviour rather than its opposite when trying to evaluate a description of someone who has been described as extroverted. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 634

Categorization

• XREF: Confirmation bias as pervasive human default connects to Luhmann’s argument that familiarity stabilizes against disconfirming experience — connects to: People deploy selective perception and motivated reasoning routinely when faced with evidence — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 144; People preferentially seek confirming evidence and avoid testing their own hypotheses. — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 93