Overall, the authors conclude: Our study shows that many biomedical findings reported by newspapers are disconfirmed by subsequent studies.
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I disconfirmed rumors that he was an arsonist, that he had a fight with his supervisor, and ended up in the state penitentiary.
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They tended to incorporate this evidence into their subsequent belief to the same extent as those people who had their prior belief disconfirmed.
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Importantly, this bias in favor of the desirable evidence emerged irrespective of whether the polls confirmed or disconfirmed peoples' prior belief about which candidate would win.
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What's more, the study finds, journalists "rarely inform the public when [initial studies] are disconfirmed" — despite the fact around half of the studies journalists write about are later rebutted by follow-up studies.
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"It is of paramount importance to fully appreciate that elucidating the neural substrates of these experiences does not diminish or depreciate their meaning and value, and that the external reality of "God" can neither be confirmed nor disconfirmed by delineating the neural correlates of religious/spiritual/mystical experiences," Beauregard and Paquette wrote in 2006.
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Disconfirmed expectancy is a psychological term for what is commonly known as a failed prophecy. According to the American social psychologist Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, disconfirmed expectancies create a state of psychological discomfort because the outcome contradicts expectancy. Upon recognizing the falsification of an expected event an individual will experience the competing cognitions, "I believe [X]," and, "I observed [Y]." The individual must either discard the now disconfirmed belief or justify why it has not actually been disconfirmed.
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Grünbaum criticizes Popper's claim that psychoanalytic propositions cannot be disconfirmed and that psychoanalysis is pseudoscientific.
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As such, disconfirmed expectancy and the factors surrounding the individual's consequent actions have been studied in various settings.
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As noted above, disconfirmed expectancy is often paired with cognitive dissonance because the disconfirmation results in two competing cognitions within the individual. As such, disconfirmed expectancy is often used as a reliable method for inducing cognitive dissonance in experimental designs. Generally this is done by introducing an outcome which is dissonant with the participant's established self-concept. The self-concept is often induced as well by creating a strong expectancy toward a certain outcome.
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The following studies have been selected to show a variety of effects found using experimental paradigms which utilize disconfirmed expectancy. This is by no means an exhaustive or comprehensive list. See Further reading below for more comprehensive reviews on the material.
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Mormonism and the Nature of God: A Theological Evolution, 1830–1915. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2000., p. 158 A review of Widmer's book by Bruening and Paulsen in the FARMS Review of Books countered that Widmer's hypothesis was "strongly disconfirmed in light of the total evidence".
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In the specific study, participants were asked to taste various solutions and rate them on bitterness and sweetness. Participants were additionally instructed to predict whether a bitter solution or a sweet solution would be tasted next, and they were given multiple trials where predictions were rigged to be correct. When participants were incorrect in their guess and had also been correct on the two preceding trials it was labeled a disconfirmed expectancy, as they had developed an expectancy over the two correct trials which was then denied. Following the disconfirmed expectancies participants reliably rated solutions as less pleasant: sweet solutions were rated less sweet and bitter solutions were rated more bitter.
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The participants gave their opinion after the first reading and were then assigned a second reading with new information. After being assigned to read more information on the issue that either confirmed or disconfirmed their initial opinion the majority of participants' opinions did not change. When asked about the information in the second reading those who did not change their opinion evaluated the information that supported their initial opinion as stronger than information that disconfirmed their initial opinion. The persistence in how the participants viewed the incoming information was based on their motivation to be correct in their initial opinion, not the persistence of an existing cognitive perspective.
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In Bacon's inductivist method, a scientist—at the time, a natural philosopher—ventures an axiom of modest scope, makes many observations, accepts the axiom if it is confirmed and never disconfirmed, then ventures another axiom only modestly broader, collects many more observations, and accepts that axiom, too, only if it is confirmed, never disconfirmed. In Novus Organum, Bacon uses the term hypothesis rarely, and usually uses it in pejorative senses, as prevalent in Bacon's time.McMullin, ch 2 in Lindberg & Westman, eds, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge U P, 1990), p 48. Yet ultimately, as applied, Bacon's term axiom is more similar now to the term hypothesis than to the term law.
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Archaeology confirms that many cities destroyed during this time period were never rebuilt. According to the Bible (2 Kings 16), the sack of Damascus was instigated by King Ahaz of Judah and ended in Rezin's execution (). The execution of Rezin is neither confirmed nor disconfirmed by independent evidence.Grabbe, Ancient Israel, p.
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The belief must have produced actions that are arguably difficult to undo. :3. The belief must be sufficiently specific and concerned with the real world such that it can be clearly disconfirmed. :4. The disconfirmatory evidence must be recognized by the believer. :5. The believer must have social support from other believers.
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Disconfirmed expectancies can influence basic hedonic judgment. According to Festinger, cognitive dissonance produces "psychological discomfort". As Carlsmith and Aronson (1963) extrapolated, it follows that this discomfort puts the individual in a negative hedonic state. Furthermore, they theorized that a negative hedonic state should bias individuals to judge environmental objects in a more negative manner.
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This can work in the opposite direction as well, and a positive deviation from a negative expectancy has a stronger effect on evaluations than confirmations do. That is, merely interacting with another person can leave a less favorable impression of that person than if a prior negative expectancy was held and then disconfirmed through interaction.
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Weiss described that there are three primary ways pathogenic beliefs may become disconfirmed or less powerful; 1) by use of the therapeutic relationship in itself, 2) by gaining insight through interpretations that help disconfirm such beliefs, or 3) when the patient tests a pathogenic belief directly with the therapist, and the therapist reacts in a way that help disconfirm the belief (passes the test).
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It is moderates (e.g. agnostics, slightly religious individuals) who likely suffer the most anxiety from their meaning systems. Religious meaning systems are especially adapted to manage anxiety about death or dying because they are unlikely to be disconfirmed (for various reasons), they are all encompassing, and they promise literal immortality. Whether emotional effects are beneficial or adverse seems to vary with the nature of the belief.
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There are several potential risks that may arise if people hold positive illusions about their personal qualities and likely outcomes. First of all, they might set themselves up for unpleasant surprises for which they are ill-prepared when their overly optimistic beliefs are disconfirmed. They may also have to tackle the consequences thereafter. However, research suggests that, for the most part, these adverse outcomes do not occur.
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Ruth Norman, after several falls and surgeries in the late eighties, had more limited physical contact with the students and members but said she was "psychically" communicating with them on a day-to-day basis. Uriel became bedridden, rarely visiting the center herself, and let members know that her work was over. She died in 1993. Her death disconfirmed a long-held prophecy that the landing would take place in her lifetime.
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Francis Bacon, articulating inductivism in England, is often falsely stereotyped as a naive inductivist. Crudely explained, the "Baconian model" advises to observe nature, propose a modest law that generalizes an observed pattern, confirm it by many observations, venture a modestly broader law, and confirm that, too, by many more observations, while discarding disconfirmed laws. Growing ever broader, the laws never quite exceed observations. Scientists, freed from preconceptions, thus gradually uncover nature's causal and material structure.
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There was in fact an increase in their proselytization and their fervor for the new religion. The prediction of the Earth's destruction became a disconfirmed expectancy which resulted in the dissonant cognitions "the world is going to end" and "the world did not end". Those who left the cult accepted that they were wrong and discarded their false cognition. Those who stayed instead looked for ways to explain the event in a way that would maintain their beliefs.
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In 1994 a membership phone list showed 66 members in Missoula, Montana, and less than 20 in other states. As Jensen's own chosen successor, Pepe Remey, refused to participate in his new sect and died in 1994. Jensen approached old age with disconfirmed prophecies, declining membership, and no Guardian to speak of when he died in 1996. A schism over leadership of the group in 2001 resulted in other defections and an unresolved court battle for control of funds.
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In philosophy of science, confirmation holism, also called epistemological holism, is the view that no individual statement can be confirmed or disconfirmed by an empirical test, but rather that only a set of statements (a whole theory) can be so. It is attributed to Willard Van Orman Quine who motivated his holism through extending Pierre Duhem's problem of underdetermination in physical theory to all knowledge claims.W. V. O. Quine. 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism.' The Philosophical Review, 60 (1951), pp. 20–43.
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He analyzes the concept of "medical theory" in line with the so-called structuralist view of theories to represent their structure and content, according to Patrick Suppes and Joseph D. Sneed's approach, as set-theoretic predicates. This enables him to show that a theory in medicine cannot be confirmed, supported, disconfirmed, verified or falsified simply because it is merely a conceptual structure and no epistemic entity to be true, probable or false. It does not make any empirical claims about the world.
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Grünbaum argues that the argument suffers from major problems. Grünbaum also criticizes the views of psychoanalysis put forward by other philosophers, including the hermeneutic interpretations propounded by Jürgen Habermas and Paul Ricœur, as well as Karl Popper's position that psychoanalytic propositions cannot be disconfirmed and that psychoanalysis is therefore a pseudoscience. The book received positive reviews and became influential. It was seen as a turning point in the debate over psychoanalysis and was regarded by some critics of Freud as a masterpiece.
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"Alan Malachowski, A bum note in morphic resonance, The Guardian 11 May 1988 They subsequently agreed to and arranged a test of the morphic resonance hypothesis using chicks. Sheldrake published his paper stating that the results matched his prediction that day-old chicks would be influenced by the experiences of previous batches of day-old chicks. "From the point of view of the hypothesis of formative causation, the results of this experiment are encouraging" and called for further research. Rose published separately, stating that morphic resonance was a "hypothesis disconfirmed.
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Adherents were mostly concentrated in Missoula, Montana, with members at times in Wyoming, Arkansas, Minnesota, Colorado, and Wisconsin. The group consisted of roughly 150 people leading up to 1980, but declined in size significantly following the disconfirmed prophecy, with almost all of the believers outside of Montana eventually rejecting Jensen's teachings. By 1990 the researchers claimed the BUPC probably had fewer than 100 members. With defection accelerating in the 1990s, they noted that in 1994 a membership phone list showed 66 members in Missoula, Montana, and less than 20 in other states,.
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When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World is a classic work of social psychology by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter published in 1956, which studied a small UFO religion in Chicago called the Seekers that believed in an imminent apocalypse and its coping mechanisms after the event did not occur. Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance can account for the psychological consequences of disconfirmed expectations. One of the first published cases of dissonance was reported in this book.
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Disconfirmed expectancy was famously illustrated in the 1956 book When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter. The book gave an inside account of a doomsday cult led by Dorothy Martin (given the alias "Marion Keech" to preserve her privacy), of Chicago. Martin claimed to have received messages from aliens forecasting a flood that would end the world on December 21, 1954. Festinger and his researchers took the chance to pretend to be a part of the cult in order to observe its behaviors and reaction when the flood failed to occur.
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Though much research has been done showing the role that disconfirmed expectancy plays in the attitudes and behavior of cultists, it likely plays a larger more general role in attributional processing and has been shown to instigate causal analysis. In theory, when events conform to expectation there is little chance that people will analyze the causes of those events. For an expected event, there is no need to update the pre-existing causal theory that was driving the expectancy. On this logic an unexpected event would likely instigate causal analysis as the existing theory has been proven false or incomplete.
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In comparing the Post-N400 Positivity (PNP) for congruent and incongruent sentence final words, a parietal PNP is observed for incongruent words. This parietal PNP is similar to the typical P600 response, suggesting continued or revised analysis. Within the congruent condition, when comparing high- and low-cloze probability sentence final words, a PNP response (if it is observed) is generally distributed across the front of the scalp. A recent study has shown that the frontal PNP may reflect processing an unexpected lexical item instead of an unexpected concept, suggesting that the frontal PNP reflects disconfirmed lexical predictions.
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Carl Trueblood Chase (7 August 1902, Lewiston, Maine – 2 November 1987, Delaware County, Pennsylvania) was an American physicist, known for his 1926 confirmation of the Trouton–Noble experiment, which disconfirmed the luminiferous aether. After graduating from Kennebunk High School, Chase attended Princeton University, where he graduated with B.S. in physics in 1924. He then became a graduate student at California Institute of Technology, where he worked at the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics and graduated with an master's degree in 1926. He received his Ph.D. from New York University (NYU), where he became an assistant professor of physics in 1934.
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The habitable zone of Gliese 581 compared with the Solar System's habitable zone. The 2007 discovery of Gliese 581 c, the first super-Earth in the circumstellar habitable zone, created significant interest in the system by the scientific community, although the planet was later found to have extreme surface conditions that may resemble Venus. Gliese 581 d, another planet in the same system and thought to be a better candidate for habitability, was also announced in 2007. Its existence was later disconfirmed in 2014, but only for short time. As of 2015, the planet has no newer disconfirmations.
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Jensen gained national attention when on April 26, 1980 he led a group of followers into fallout shelters, expecting an apocalyptic nuclear holocaust. He went on to predict that Halley's Comet would enter earth's orbit on April 29, 1986, and collide with the earth exactly one year later. With Jensen's approval, in the early 1990s his companion Neal Chase made a total of 18 disconfirmed prophecies that pertained to small-scale disasters that he claimed would lead step-by-step towards the Apocalypse, as well as dates for a nuclear attack on New York City by middle Eastern terrorists.
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Jensen taught that the leadership of the mainstream Baháʼí community had gone astray, and that Mason Remey was the next rightful heir to leadership after Shoghi Effendi. Jensen considered himself restoring the rightful leadership, which he believed had been passed to Remey's adopted son Pepe Remey. Pepe denied this claim and refused association with Jensen's group, thus leaving Jensen's followers with no clear scripturally sanctioned leadership. Jensen's followers consisted of roughly 150 people leading up to 1980, but declined in size significantly following the disconfirmed prophecy, with almost all of the believers outside of Montana eventually rejecting Jensen's teachings.
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David J. Lubinski is an American psychology professor known for his work in applied research, psychometrics, and individual differences. His work (with Camilla Benbow) has focussed on exceptionally able children: the nature of exceptional ability, the development of people with exceptional ability (in particular meeting the educational needs of gifted children to maximise their talent). He has published widely on the impact of extremely high ability on outputs such as publications, creative writing and art, patents etc. This work disconfirmed the "threshold hypothesis" which suggested that a certain minimum of IQ might be needed, but higher IQ did not translate into greater productivity or creativity.
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Construct validity concerns whether evidence can show that what the instrument is measuring is at all what the offered theory claims it is (whether each construct in the model "adequately represents what is intended by theoretical account of the construct being measured"Validity (statistics)#Construct validity). > The data disconfirmed both the two- and four-factor confirmatory models. In > the post hoc exploratory factor analyses, many of the factor > pattern/structure coefficients were ambiguously associated with two or more > of the four theoretical channels as well. Overall, there was little support > for the GSD's theoretical basis or design and the concomitant accurate > portrayal of one's cognitive learning style.
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191 Gardner described his own belief as philosophical theism inspired by the works of philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. While eschewing systematic religious doctrine, he retained a belief in God, asserting that this belief cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed by reason or science.Groth (1983) At the same time, he was skeptical of claims that any god has communicated with human beings through spoken or telepathic revelation or through miracles in the natural world.Martin Gardner: 1914-2010: Chris French mourns the passing of Martin Gardner, The Guardian, May 25, 2010 Gardner has been quoted as saying that he regarded parapsychology and other research into the paranormal as tantamount to "tempting God" and seeking "signs and wonders".
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In 1979, approximately 6 years after being released from prison, Jensen began teaching his followers that on April 29, 1980 a nuclear holocaust would kill a third of the world's population, and that over the next twenty years, the planet would be ravaged until in the year 2000 "God's Kingdom" would be established and a thousand years of peace would follow. On the fateful night, Jensen led a group of followers into fallout shelters in Missoula, Montana. The disconfirmed prophecy resulted in Jensen losing several contingents of adherents, and his response was that he was right all along. Over the following years Jensen used several types of explanations, as noted by researcher Robert Balch, #The prediction was fulfilled spiritually rather than physically.
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Gliese 581 g, yet another planet thought to have been discovered in the circumstellar habitable zone of the system, was considered to be more habitable than both Gliese 581 c and d. However, its existence was also disconfirmed in 2014, and astronomers are divided about its existence. A diagram comparing size (artist's impression) and orbital position of planet Kepler-22b within Sun-like star Kepler 22's habitable zone and that of Earth in the Solar System Discovered in August 2011, HD 85512 b was initially speculated to be habitable, but the new circumstellar habitable zone criteria devised by Kopparapu et al. in 2013 place the planet outside the circumstellar habitable zone. Kepler-22 b, discovered in December 2011 by the Kepler space probe, is the first transiting exoplanet discovered around a Sun-like star. With a radius 2.4 times that of Earth, Kepler-22b has been predicted by some to be an ocean planet.: "If it [Kepler-22b] had a similar composition to Earth, then we're looking at a world in excess of about 40 Earth masses".
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