I am not familiar with terms in psycology, but believe the following phenomena ought to have a name: When technology is demonstrated for a group of people, there is always someone who attempts to interpret unclear results in favor of the machine.

Before Tue Lehn-Schiøler and I started up the machine learning company Epital, I was working in the Intelligent Sound Project – a research collaboration between Technical University of Denmark and Aalborg University. One of the things we were working on, was a plugin for WinAmp which predicted musical genre from the music only. It actually works, and I believe that the machine learning behind the thing has a good chance of being a commercial hit in some form or another. But during development, we also had troubles of course and sometimes the genre-predictor made spurious results during demonstrations – very inconvenient indeed – but help was near: Among the audience there was always someone saying stuff like:

- ”Well, no wonder it says ZZ-Top is jazz, listen to the bass intro”

or similar things. It seems, there is always someone who either believe in the machine or in some other way sympathize with the technology. It may also be that the person simply trusts the machine completely and cannot imagine it to be wrong, but to me it looks like a tendency to find confirmation of an assumed pattern.

The assumed pattern is that the technology is right. That there is a pattern or a system, and the search for justification of the mechanism may reflect the evolutionary benefit of spotting a system in an otherwise random environment: If there is a system it is important to detect and make use of it before the competitors, and to believe in a system where there is only randomness, probably doesn't hurt too much.