Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out, interpret, remember, or give greater weight to information that supports an existing belief while overlooking or discounting evidence that contradicts it. It is a common cognitive bias that affects decision-making in science, medicine, gardening, and everyday life.
In gardening and plant care, confirmation bias can lead people to attribute a plant’s improvement to a treatment they expected to work, even when recovery was due to normal growth, environmental changes, or another factor. It can also reinforce gardening myths when successes are remembered more readily than failures. Controlled experiments, replication, and objective measurements help reduce the influence of confirmation bias.
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