Is There a Confirmation Bias?

In many of the standard logic oriented, critical thinking text books used in college and university class rooms, you won't even find the term confirmation bias in the glossary or the index. People's natural psychology is driven by confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, cognitive dissonance and a host of other biases and situational factors that operate unconsciously to influence how we respond to disagreement and to efforts to persuade us. I think it's important that we speak more openly about these psychological realities and make that discussion part of our training in critical thinking and argumentation. But right now, this discussion is not happening. With very rare exceptions, it's not happening in the standard text books, and its not happened in the