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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.
    This point is illustrated even more directly by research conducted in my own laboratory on the tendency of gamblers to evaluate outcomes in a biased manner. 7 This research began with the question of why gamblers persist in such an unrewarding enterprise. Why do gamblers believe, despite all their previous losses, that success is just around the corner? One might have predicted that they do so by remembering their successes and forgetting or repressing their failures. However, the actual state of affairs is more complicated. Gamblers do revise their personal histories of success and failure, but they do so in a way that is more subtle, and rather interesting.
    The most direct evidence for this claim comes from a study in which people who had bet on professional football games provided tape-recorded accounts of their thoughts about the outcomes of their bets. (Their thoughts were recorded in the guise of keeping a record for themselves to help them make additional bets later in the season.) An analysis of their comments indicated that they spent more time discussing their
losses
than their wins. Furthermore, the kind of comments made about wins and losses were quite different. The bettors tended to make “undoing” comments about their losses—comments to the effect that the outcome would have been different if not for some anomalous or “fluke” element (“… it was just luck. Their quarterback got hurt during the game and that probably led to their defeat.”). In contrast, they tended to make “bolstering” comments about their wins—comments indicating that the outcome either should have been as it was, or should have been even more extreme in the same direction (“I don’t think you can put the blame on losing the quarterback. He is an exceptional quarterback, but so is their backup”). By carefully scrutinizing and explaining away their losses, while accepting their successes at face value, gamblers do indeed rewrite their personal histories of success and failure. Losses are often counted, not as losses, but as “near wins.”
    One consequence of the greater amount of time the bettors spent scrutinizing their losses is particularly noteworthy: They remembered their losses better than their wins when tested three weeks later. This contradicts everyday intuition as well as a good deal of psychological theorizing that would have us believe that people remain confident in the possibility of future success by selectively remembering their successes and forgetting their failures. 8
    The studies of gambling and of capital punishment demonstrate that we do not generally treat information at variance with our beliefs as lightly as is sometimes thought, although such information is dealt with in such a way that it has relatively little impact on our beliefs. Rather than simply ignoring contradictory information, we often examine it particularly closely. The end product of this intense scrutiny is that the contradictory information is either considered too flawed to be relevant, or is redefined into a less damaging category. Opponents of the death penalty come to view evidence supporting the deterrent efficacy of capital punishment as hopelessly deficient and uninformative. Gamblers come to see negative outcomes not as losses that signal the difficulty of ever coming out ahead, but as near-wins that call for just a little strategic fine-tuning.
BIASED EVALUATION OF SCIENTIFIC FINDINGS
     
    Gamblers and partisans of the capital