Murphy's law a.k.a confirmation bias

"Anything that can possibly go wrong, does" populary known as Murphy's law. I've often seen my friends lament about the frequent occurence of Murphy's law and I'm no exception to observing and quoting Murphy's law whenever I'm at its receiving end. However I'm now beginning to wonder if Murphy's law is just the result of "confirmation bias". Confirmation bias! what's that. Confirmation bias is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses, independently of whether they are true (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias).


A typical example of a confirmation bias would be a tendency to say "It rains just after I get my car washed" (implying it was a waste of money to have washed it). The human mind is very selective, since it reinforces the validity of the hypothesis every time it rains after car-wash but never vice-versa. In due course of time the hypothesis is reinforced sufficiently to now be considered a truth.

Generlizing the above occurence, whenever we have an occasion where we there are one set of events that are favorable and another unfavorable, we will go on our Murphy rant whenever an event from the unfavorable set occurs. Never vice versa. For people interested in reading a whole book on this subject I would recommend Thomas Gilovich's superb book http://www.amazon.com/How-Know-What-Isnt-Fallibility/dp/0029117062/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275739184&sr=8-1-catcorr which goes on to debunk several unproven popular theories like "Childless couples have a biological child once they adopt", "Hot hand in basketball" etc etc. Happy weekend.