““Now consider what the participants in this experiment did not do. They did not miscontrue the evidence against their position as being more favorable than it really was. They correctly saw hostile findings as hostile findings. Nor did the participants simply ignore these negative results. Instead, they carefully scrutinized the studies that produced these unwanted and unexpected findings, and came up with criticisms that were largely appropriate. Rather than ignoring outright the evidence at variance with their expectations, the participants cognitively transformed it into evidence that was considered relatively uninformative and could be assigned little weight. Thus, the participants’ expectations had their effect not through a simple process of ignoring inconsistent results, but through a more complicated process that involved a fair amount of cognitive effort.””
