Debiasing

Debiasing is the reduction of bias, particularly with respect to judgment and decision making. Biased judgment and decision making is that which systematically deviates from the prescriptions of objective standards such as facts, logic, and rational behavior or prescriptive norms. Biased judgment and decision making exists in consequential domains such as medicine, law, policy, and business, as well as in everyday life. Investors, for example, tend to hold onto falling stocks too long and sell rising stocks too quickly. Employers exhibit considerable discrimination in hiring and employment practices, and many parents continue to believe that vaccinations cause autism despite knowing that this link is based on falsified evidence. At an individual level, people who exhibit less decision bias have more intact social environments, reduced risk of alcohol and drug use, lower childhood delinquency rates, and superior planning and problem solving abilities.

Debiasing can occur within the decision maker. For example, a person may learn or adopt better strategies by which to make judgments and decisions. Debiasing can also occur as a result of changes in external factors, such as changing the incentives relevant to a decision or the manner in which the decision is made.

There are three general approaches to debiasing judgment and decision making, and the costly errors with which biased judgment and decision making is associated: changing incentives, nudging, and training. Each approach has strengths and weaknesses. For more details, see Morewedge and colleagues (2015).

Changing incentives can be an effective means to debias judgment and decision making. This approach is generally derived from economic theories suggesting that people act in their self-interest by seeking to maximize their utility over their lifetime. Many decision making biases may occur simply because they are more costly to eliminate than to ignore. Making people more accountable for their decisions (increasing incentives), for example, can increase the extent to which they invest cognitive resources in making decisions, leading to less biased decision making when people generally have an idea of how a decision should be made. However, "bias" might not be the appropriate term for these types of decision making errors. These "strategy-based" errors occur simply because the necessary effort outweighs the benefit. If a person makes a suboptimal choice based on an actual bias, then incentives may exacerbate the issue. An incentive in this case may simply cause the person to perform the suboptimal behavior more enthusiastically.

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