An indirect debiasing method: Priming a target attribute reduces judgmental biases in likelihood estimations

Understanding the underlying psychological process that leads to a bias is crucial for developing remedies to correct or reduce the bias. As one of the psychological processes that underlie judgmental biases, attribute substitution provides an explanation as to why people rely on heuristics and comm...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2019-03, Vol.14 (3), p.e0212609
Main Author: Lee, Kelly Kiyeon
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Bias
Biology and Life Sciences
Cognitive biases
Error analysis (Mathematics)
Female
Heuristics
Humans
Judgment - physiology
Likelihood Functions
Male
Mathematical research
Medicine and Health Sciences
Social Sciences
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Summary:Understanding the underlying psychological process that leads to a bias is crucial for developing remedies to correct or reduce the bias. As one of the psychological processes that underlie judgmental biases, attribute substitution provides an explanation as to why people rely on heuristics and commit judgmental biases. Attribute substitution occurs when people make a judgment that requires the use of a target attribute, but make the judgment using a heuristic attribute that comes more readily to mind. This substitution inevitably introduces systematic errors because these two attributes are different. The current work explores an indirect debiasing method-the priming of a target attribute. Across three experiments, we demonstrate that priming a target attribute in prior tasks reduces judgmental biases in likelihood estimations: ratio-bias and base-rate neglect. However, this outcome only occurs when participants have enough cognitive resources. When they experience cognitive load, the priming of the target attribute does not reduce their judgmental biases.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0212609