Confirmation Bias In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

The film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest directed by Milos Forman, is the story about a man named Randle McMurphy who gets transferred from prison to a mental institution. In this film, there are examples of various concepts discussed in class. These concepts are, confirmation bias, overconfidence phenomenon, fundamental attribution error and false consensus effect. This paper is going to explore these concepts.
One of the concepts that is going to be explored first is the confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for information that affirms one's preconceptions and disregards evidence to the contrary. One is eager to verify their own beliefs, but are not so inclined to search for any indication that might prove them false. In the film, the very strict nurse Ratched believes that all of the patients in the mental institution are clinically insane. Since she see’s them that way and only that way she tends to directs questions towards the patients in the group in such a way that confirms her own beliefs about them being crazy. When nurse Ratched would bring up Billy’s mom, he would become visibly upset …show more content…
The overconfidence phenomenon when one overestimates the accuracy of one’s beliefs and tend to be more confident than they are correct. One example of this is the movie is when McMurphy believes that he can lift the sink in the washroom and throw it out the window so that he can escape, go downtown and watch the world series. Billy told him that he can’t do it and he could not get out of there. However, McMurphy is confident he can do it and asked anybody if they wanted to bet that he could not do it. People start betting and Billy keeps trying to tell him that nobody could ever lift it. McMurphy being as confident as he is tries with all his might to lift it and fails over and over again. He overestimated his own ability and ended up being wrong in the