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confirmation bias

A cognitive bias where people give more weight to information that supports their existing beliefs or hypotheses and downplay or ignore conflicting evidence.

Key Points

  • Leads people to seek, interpret, and remember data that aligns with their prior views.
  • Skews estimates, risk assessments, and prioritization by filtering out disconfirming facts.
  • Countermeasures include actively searching for disconfirming evidence, inviting diverse perspectives, and using decision checklists.
  • In agile, rely on empirical validation (experiments, MVPs, A/B tests), sprint reviews, and retrospectives to challenge assumptions.

Example

A product owner believes a new feature will boost adoption and highlights a few enthusiastic stakeholder comments while ignoring analytics that show low usage of similar features. The team runs an A/B test and discovers the feature does not improve activation, prompting a pivot.

PMP Example Question

During backlog refinement, the sponsor insists a feature will increase revenue and cites only supportive anecdotes. What should the agile team do to best reduce confirmation bias?

  1. Invite only subject matter experts who agree with the sponsor to keep the discussion focused.
  2. Hold a pre-mortem and require evidence that could disprove the assumption before prioritizing the feature.
  3. Extend the next sprint to collect more opinions from the same stakeholders.
  4. Skip the sprint review metrics and rely on the sponsor's experience for the decision.

Correct Answer: B — Use a pre-mortem and seek disconfirming evidence

Explanation: Proactively looking for data that could invalidate the assumption is a direct way to counter confirmation bias and supports evidence-based prioritization.

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