crazy88

Some of this post is an expansion of topics covered by Lukeprog here 1. Knowing about biases (doesn't stop you being biased) Imagine you had to teach a course that would help people to become less biased. What would you teach? A natural idea, tempting enough in theory, might be that you should teach the students about all of the biases that influence their decision making. Once someone knows that they suffer from overconfidence in their ability to predict future events, surely they will adjust their confidence accordingly. Readers of Less Wrong will be aware that it's more complicated than that. There is a mass of research showing that knowing about cognitive biases does not stop someone from being biased. Quattrone et. al. (1981) showed that anchoring effects are not decreased by instructing subjects to avoid the bias. Similarly, Pohl et. al. (1996) demonstrate that the same applies to the hindsight bias. Finally, Arzy et al (2009) showed that including a misleading detail in a description of a medical case significantly decreased diagnostic accuracy. Accuracy does not improve if doctors are warned that such information may be present. 2. Consider the opposite (but not too much) So what does lead to debiasing? As Lukeprog mentioned one well supported tactic is that of "consider the opposite", which involves simply considering some reasons that an initial judgment might be incorrect. This has been shown to help counter overconfidence and hindsight bias as well as anchoring. See, for example, Arkes (1991) or Mussweiler et. al. (2000) for studies along this line. There are two more things worth noting about this tactic. The first is that Soll and Klayman (2004) have demonstrated that a related tactic has positive results in relation to overconfidence. In their experiment, Soll and Klayman asked subjects to give an interval such that they are 80% sure that the answer to a question lay within this interval. So they asked for predictions of things like the birth y