how to debias base rate neglect
Convert numbers and rates into equivalent traits or dispositions: Convert "85% of the taxis in the city are green" to "85% of previous accidents involved drivers of green cabs". (Recent Kahneman interview)
Requisition social thinking: Convert "85%" to "85 out of 100", or "Which cards must you turn over" to "which people must you check further" (Wason test).
how to debias framing effects
Have people been trained in automatically thinking of "mortality rates" as "survival rates" and such? A good dojo game to play would be practicing thinking in terms of an opposite framing as quickly as possible, until it became pre-conscious, and one consciously became aware of what one heard and its opposite at the same time.
Fresh off the presses at Yale's American Political Science Review from August: http://bullock.research.yale.edu/papers/elite/elite.pdf
An enduring concern about democracies is that citizens conform too readily to the policy views of elites in their own parties, even to the point of ignoring other information about the policies in question. This article presents two experiments that undermine this concern, at least under one important condition. People rarely possess even a modicum of information about policies; but when they do, their attitudes seem to be affected at least as much by that information as by cues from party elites. The experiments also measure the extent to which people think about policy. Contrary to many accounts, they suggest that party cues do not inhibit such thinking. This is not cause for unbridled optimism about citizens’ ability to make good decisions, but it is reason to be more sanguine about their ability to use information about policy when they have it.
(Emphasis mine.)
If one knew the extent one was biased by cues, and one knew one's opinion based on cues and facts, it would be possible to calculate what one's views would be without cues.
Thanks! I knew some of that stuff, but not all. But for the table of thinking errors and debiasing techniques I need the references, too.
Hey Less Wrong,
I'm currently taking a cognitive psychology class, and will be designing and conducting a research project in the field — and I'd like to do it on human judgment, specifically heuristics and biases. I'm currently doing preliminary research to come up with a more specific topic to base my project on, and I figured Less Wrong would be the place to come to find questions about flawed human judgment. So: any ideas?
(I'll probably be using these ideas mostly as guidelines for forming my research question, since I doubt it would be academically honest to take them outright. The study will probably take the form of a questionnaire or online survey, but experimental manipulation is certainly possible and it might be possible to make use of other psych department resources.)