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

Abstract

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.

Cognitive biases in MCDM methods: an embedded filter proposal through sustainable supplier selection problem

“…Another avenue for future research relates to the gaps in the literature about the antecedents of cognitive biases like individual differences (such as gender) and emotions (such as such as apprehension, fear or anxiety) (Fagley et al , 2010). To reduce the bias, understanding the underlying psychological process is crucial (Lee, 2019). As decision-making is a complex activity that is influenced by many factors (Korhonen et al , 2018), cognitive biases' antecedents need to be analyzed.…”

“…The results of experiments showed that debiasing-training effects can improve decision-making. Lee (2019) explored the priming of a target attribute as an indirect debiasing method. After three experiments, it was demonstrated that judgmental biases reduced in likelihood estimations: ratio-bias and base-rate neglect when participants have enough cognitive resources.…”

“…However, cognitive biases actually play a vital role in MCDM methods; there have been few researches on how to formally model the cognitive limitations in MCDM problems. Some researches (Soman and Liu, 2011; Croskerry et al , 2013b, Frydman and Rangel, 2014; Cheng et al , 2014; Morewedge et al , 2015; Sellier et al , 2019 and Lee, 2019) only focus on psychological investigations and experiments, as summarized in Section 2.2. Only few of them give a formal treatment for MCDM problems (Ma et al , 2017).…”

Implicit and explicit processing on base rate neglect problems

“…There are many factors, however, that influence adult judgements on these problems. Relatively straightforward task manipulations that enhance the salience or relevance of the base rate information have led to an attenuation, elimination, or even a reversal of the BRN effect (Bago & De Neys, 2020; Case et al, 1999; Chun & Kruglanski, 2006; Hsee et al, 2019; Lee, 2019; Pennycook et al, 2014; Pennycook & Thompson, 2012; Wu & Emery, 2021). Similarly, manipulations that clarify the causal relation underlying the stereotypes in the case description increase belief-based responding on the task (Turpin et al, 2020).…”

O viés de ancoragem pode ser previsto e mitigado? a aplicação do teste do reflexo cognitivo e do treinamento como técnica de debias

“…nos auxilia a ter a dimensão da velocidade com que os pesquisadores exploravam tal questão naquela época. empregada para reduzir o viés da taxa base (que consiste em ignorar a probabilidade envolvida na ocorrência de eventos), que se mostrou eficaz, consiste em apresentar palavras relacionadas com o atributo final da decisão em questão, tais como "probabilidade, proporção, percentual, possibilidade e chances"(Lee, 2019). Ainda que exposto de maneira rápida a esse estímulo (palavrasenviesado(Li & Cheung, 2020), uma vez que levam os requerentes a revisar e reestimar as suas decisões.…”