We humans seem to be extremely good at generating ideas, theories, and explanations that have the ring of plausibility.13 We may be relatively deficient, however, in evaluating and testing our ideas once they are formed. One of the biggest impediments to doing so is our failure to realize that when we do not precisely specify the kind of evidence that will count as support for our position, we can end up “detecting” too much evidence for our preconceptions.
