Mechanisms — bias, prediction, self-efficacy

Overview

Open-access sources on the psychological mechanisms that the practice ("rune magic / programming reality") leans on. Every claim below is a documented internal effect (in the practitioner's perception, affect, belief, or behavior), and not proof that runes/magic change external physical reality. We keep the mechanisms neutral and inward-directed (perception / expectation / belief / self-regulation).

It continues attention, placebo, ritual. That work covered selective attention / the frequency illusion, placebo/expectation, the ideomotor effect, and anxiety reduction through ritual. Here two adjacent mechanisms are added.

Three topics, one peer-reviewed open-access source each (one topic has a second open-access source):

1. Confirmation bias — Rollwage & Fleming (2021), Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B — modeling/simulation. (Nickerson 1998 checked → NOT genuine open access, see below.)
2. Predictive processing / active inference — Sel (2014), Frontiers in Psychology — a theoretical review (interoception/emotion/the self).
3. Self-efficacy (Bandura's framework) — Lochbaum et al. (2023), Sports — a meta-analysis (the main one, with effect sizes); plus Pfitzner-Eden (2016), Frontiers in Psychology — a longitudinal test of Bandura's four sources.

A note on honesty regarding Nickerson 1998. Nickerson, R. S. (1998), Confirmation bias: a ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises, Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175–220 (DOI 10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175) was earlier flagged as a candidate. Checked — this is NOT genuine open access. It's an APA-journal article (now distributed via SAGE); the freely downloadable PDFs circulating online (e.g. an author/teaching copy on pages.ucsd.edu and an upload on ResearchGate) are self-hosted / "green" copies, not an OA license. The publisher pages (APA PsycNet, SAGE) are paywalled, abstract only. → Not counted as a downloaded open-access source. here would resolve negative; do not treat it as open access. Confirmation bias instead rests on the CC-BY source below.

The strength of evidence is given per source (design, n / number of effects, replication or preregistration — only if stated). Small lab / simulation / meta-analytic scales → mechanism plausibility, not proof of "manifestation" at the population level.

1. Confirmation bias

Citation: Rollwage, M., & Fleming, S. M. (2021). Confirmation bias is adaptive when coupled with efficient metacognition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 376(1822), 20200131.

• mechanism-evidence Confirmation bias is operationalized here as the selective weighting of post-decision evidence: once an agent has committed to a choice, it down-weights later evidence that contradicts the choice and up-weights confirming evidence. This is a formal analog of a practitioner who, after choosing/charging a rune, predominantly registers confirming "signs" and discounts disconfirming ones.
• mechanism-evidence The bias is maladaptive on its own: in the simulations, higher confirmation bias lowered decision accuracy (about 8 percentage points worse on a two-alternative task), worst when the initial evidence was weak and the later corrective evidence was reliable. → "Clinging to the first read" costs accuracy when the world later disagrees with you.
• mechanism-evidence But metacognition flips the sign: a confidence-weighted version (down-weighting post-decision evidence only when internal confidence is high, staying open under uncertainty) outperformed the naive biased agent, and for agents with high metacognitive efficiency (meta-d′/d′ > 1) it could even beat an unbiased Bayesian agent (p < 0.0001). → The bias isn't simply "irrational"; it's a heuristic whose harm depends on how well the agent tracks its own confidence.

Strength of evidence: This is a computational/simulation study (~200,000 trials per condition) plus theoretical synthesis — not a behavioral experiment on people, so it shows the logical/normative structure of the bias, not a measured effect size in humans. CC-BY, peer-reviewed, in a high-level journal, but the "adaptive-with-metacognition" conclusion is a model result; validation on human data is argued here, not demonstrated. For our knowledge base: fine for explaining why "the rune works / I keep seeing confirmations" — it's a real, structured cognitive tendency. [unverified] that the specific quantitative thresholds transfer to rune-belief contexts. (The empirical human-confirmation-bias classics like Wason are not open access and aren't cited here.)

2. Predictive processing / active inference

Citation: Sel, A. (2014). Predictive codes of interoception, emotion, and the self. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 189.

• mechanism-evidence The brain doesn't just receive signals — it predicts them in advance. Perception is "top-down," not passively "bottom-up": the brain builds a guess about the causes of what it feels, checks it against the incoming signal — and what reaches consciousness is this corrected guess. That is, expectation actively shapes experience (this is the predictive-coding model; the article draws on Seth's interoceptive-inferential version, where "priors" are corrected by "prediction error"). → A mechanistic basis for "having an intention/expectation changes what you feel and notice."
• mechanism-evidence The brain fits the picture to its prediction in two ways (it minimizes "prediction error"): either it updates the guess itself (perceptual learning), or it acts and adjusts the body so the world matches the prediction (active inference). When the internal discrepancy is small, there's a quiet bodily adjustment rather than conscious perception. → A belief/expectation can be "confirmed" by the body retuning to it, not only by external events.
• mechanism-evidence Attention amplifies the signal it's directed at (formally, "precision-weighting of prediction error"). Direct attention to a sensation tied to a rune ritual and it becomes sharper, internal (interoceptive) perception keener. This explains why focused ritual attention makes the effect more vivid and "real."

Strength of evidence: A theoretical/review article (single author) synthesizing the predictive-coding framework for interoception/emotion/the self — it proposes and integrates but does not report a new experiment or effect size. Predictive processing is an influential and widely supported framework, but it remains a model paradigm under active debate (its global empirical status is contested in the broader literature — for any claim that it's "proven"). For this knowledge base: strong as an explanatory scaffold for "expectation shapes perception," weak as direct proof. [unverified] any move from "priors shape interoception" to "intention changes external events."

3. Self-efficacy (Bandura's framework)

Main citation (meta-analysis, with effect sizes): Lochbaum, M., Sisneros, C., Cooper, S., & Terry, P. C. (2023). Pre-event self-efficacy and sports performance: a systematic review with meta-analysis. Sports, 11(11), 222.

Additional citation (test of the sources of self-efficacy): Pfitzner-Eden, F. (2016). Why do I feel more confident? Bandura's sources predict preservice teachers' latent changes in teacher self-efficacy. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1486. DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01486

Note: Bandura's primary works on self-efficacy are mostly paywalled; both sources here are secondary (an applied meta-analysis + an applied test of the four sources), per the rule of academic honesty. Bandura's primary text was not read — the concepts attributed to "Bandura's framework" are taken through these secondary open-access works. for any direct Bandura quote.

• mechanism-evidence (Lochbaum 2023) Across 44 papers / 55 independent samples, N = 5,373 (1983–2021), pre-event self-efficacy and subsequent sports performance correlate at r = 0.31 (95% CI 0.22–0.40) — a "medium" positive link: believing you'll cope is associated with a better result. → A real but moderate "self-belief → result" signal.
• mechanism-evidence (Lochbaum 2023) The link is conditional, not a law. Heterogeneity was very high (I² = 96%), and the prediction interval ran from −0.39 to 0.79 — i.e. in some contexts high self-efficacy did not help the result (or went slightly worse). It was stronger where the measures were matched (r = 0.37), in closed-skill sports (r = 0.37), and among elite athletes (r = 0.40). → An honest ceiling for "confidence guarantees a result."
• mechanism-evidence (Pfitzner-Eden 2016) In a longitudinal study with two cohorts (T1 N ≈ 359 / 395; at T2 a retention of 42–50%), mastery experience was the strongest predictor of change in self-efficacy (β ≈ 0.24 to 0.36), while the other three Bandura sources (vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, the physiological/affective state) acted mostly indirectly, through how the person interpreted their mastery experience. → Self-efficacy is built mainly through doing-and-succeeding (and how the person reads it) — a lever that a rune practice's ritual could plausibly press internally.

Strength of evidence: Lochbaum 2023 = a full meta-analysis (the largest, most quantitative item), CC-BY, with publication-bias checks (trim-and-fill flagged ~10 missing studies; the fail-safe n is large → robust). But high heterogeneity (I² = 96%) and a wide prediction interval mean the pooled r is a blurred average, and it's a correlation (self-efficacy ↔ result, direction not isolated). Pfitzner-Eden 2016 is longitudinal (it supports the direction: experience → efficacy), but single-context (teacher trainees on placement), with small standardized effects and substantial dropout (40–58% lost by T2). In sum: self-efficacy is a well-supported internal correlate of performance/persistence, moderate in size and context-dependent — not proof of external causation. [unverified] transfer to "a rune-charged confidence changes life outcomes."

Addition to the practice→mechanism table

It supplements the table in attention, placebo, ritual. All the rows below are internal (cognitive / perceptual / belief-related / self-regulatory) mechanisms; none proves external causation.

[unverified] any arrows of "→ a change in external physical reality."