Weakening the ideological immune system: can debiasing techniques reduce confirmation bias?

ABSTRACT

Psychologists have identified confirmation bias as a contributor to conflict and ideological extremism. However, the efficacy of social science’s existing arsenal of debiasing techniques remains largely unknown, and the extant positive findings have often been inconsistent and are in need of independent replication. In this registered report, we empirically tested the efficacy of three cognitive debiasing techniques in mitigating confirmation bias: consider-the-opposite, psychoeducation about bias, and social norms manipulation. In the control group, participants exhibited two manifestations of confirmation bias: selective exposure and biased assimilation. When it came to reducing these biases, we found evidence that the social norms technique reduced selective exposure relative to the control group, but little evidence that this was the case for the consider-the-opposite or psychoeducation techniques was found. None of the debiasing strategies significantly reduced biased assimilation relative to the control group. Comparing these strategies provides theoretical advancement in the processes that give rise to confirmation bias, and moreover, these results help to identify a promising technique to serve as the foundation for debiasing interventions, namely social norms interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Confirmation bias
• social norms
• psychoeducation
• perspective taking
• selective exposure
• biased assimilation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data, materials, and online resources

The materials for this project can be found online at the project’s OSF page: https://osf.io/28fyq/?view_only=de2538e795ed40a99cc44be591cbc720

Preregistration

The preregistration for this project can be found online at the project’s OSF page: https://osf.io/28fyq/?view_only=de2538e795ed40a99cc44be591cbc720

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/23743603.2023.2196755

Notes

1. Some researchers have also conceptualized another component of confirmation bias as a bias in recall (Baron, 1991; Perkins et al., 1983).