Procedural Debiasing

Abstract
As knowledge increases about human judgement processes, it is natural to suppose that it will be possible to use this knowledge in order to improve human judgment in situations where biases of various sorts have been shown to occur. Despite the reasonableness of this expectation, judgmental debiasing has proven extraordinarily difficult in most cases. This paper suggests that the reason for this failure is that debiasing must be in terms of the procedures that are actually used in the act of judging, procedures about which very little is known. Two experiments are presented that illustrate how such procedural debiasing can be used to debias a Bayesian inference task. In the first experiment, a training procedure is used that corrects a common error in the direction of the adjustment process that subjects use when integrating later evidence with earlier partial judgments. In the second procedure a focusing technique is used to improve the relative weighting of samples in the overall judgment. Each of the procedures accomplishes its particular end, and taken together the two procedures allow naive subjects to produce judgments that are essentially Bayesian. These results are discussed in terms of a theoretical model of the judgment process in which four basic stages are repeated cyclically: (a) initial scanning of the stimulus information; (b) selection of items for processing in order of importance; (c) extraction of scale values on the given dimension of judgment; and (d) adjustment of a composite value that summarizes already processed components.

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