Anchoring in a Social Context: How the Possibility of Being Misinformed by Others Impacts One's Judgment (original) (raw)
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In this article I argue that most biases in argumentation and decision-making can and should be counteracted. Although biases can prove beneficial in certain contexts, I contend that they are generally maladaptive and need correction. Yet critical thinking alone seems insufficient to mitigate biases in everyday contexts. I develop a contextualist approach, according to which cognitive debiasing strategies need to be supplemented by extra-psychic devices that rely on social and environmental constraints in order to promote rational reasoning. Finally, I examine several examples of contextual debiasing strategies and show how they can contribute to enhance critical thinking at a cognitive level.
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Merely thinking about a proposition can increase its subjective truth, even when it is initially denied. Propositions may trigger inferences that depend not on evidence for truth but only on the semantic match with relevant knowledge. In a series of experiments, participants were presented with questions implying positive or negative judgments of discussants in a videotaped talk show. Subsequent ratings were biased toward the question contents, even when the judges themselves initially denied the questions. However, this constructive bias is subject to epistemic constraints. Judgments were biased only when knowledge about the target's role (active agent vs. passive recipient role) was matched by the semantic-linguistic implications of propositions (including action verbs vs. state verbs).
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Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2021
False beliefs can spread within societies even when they are costly and when individuals share access to the same objective reality. Research on the cultural evolution of misbeliefs has demonstrated that a social context can explain what people think, but not whether it also explains how people think. We shift the focus from the diffusion of false beliefs to the diffusion of suboptimal belief-formation strategies, and identify a novel mechanism whereby misbeliefs arise and spread. We show that, when individual decision-makers have access to the datagathering behaviour of others, the tendency to make decisions on the basis of insufficient evidence is amplified, increasing the rate of incorrect, costly decisions. We argue that this mechanism fills a gap in current explanations of problematic, widespread misbeliefs such as climate change denial.
False polarization: Debiasing as applied social epistemology
Synthese 191.11: 2529-2547., 2014
False polarization (FP) is an interpersonal bias on judgement, the effect of which is to lead people in contexts of disagreement to overestimate the differences between their respective views. I propose to treat FP as a problem of applied social epistemology—a barrier to reliable belief-formation in certain social domains—and to ask how best one may debias for FP. This inquiry leads more generally into questions about effective debiasing strategies; on this front, considerable empirical evidence suggests that intuitively attractive strategies for debiasing are not very effective, while more effective strategies are neither intuitive nor likely to be easily implemented. The supports for more effective debiasing seem either to be inherently social and cooperative, or at least to presuppose social efforts to create physical or decision-making infrastructure for mitigating bias. The upshot, I argue, is that becoming a less biased epistemic agent is a thoroughly socialized project.
Feeling Validated Versus Being Correct: A Meta-Analysis of Selective Exposure to Information
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Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2019
Anecdotally, attributions that others are biased pervade many domains. Yet, research examining the effects of perceptions of bias is sparse, possibly due to some prior researchers conflating bias with untrustworthiness. We sought to demonstrate that perceptions of bias and untrustworthiness are separable and have independent effects. The current work examines these differences in the persuasion domain, but this distinction has implications for other domains as well. Two experiments clarify the conceptual distinction between bias (skewed perception) and untrustworthiness (dishonesty) and three studies demonstrate that source bias can have a negative effect on persuasion and source credibility beyond any parallel effects of untrustworthiness, lack of expertise, and dislikability. The current work suggests that bias is an independent, but understudied source characteristic.