By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm:
Litigators are used to arguing, refuting, and persuading. When it comes to selecting jurors, they’re also used to uncovering bias. But what is “debiasing”? While my spellchecker continues to reject the term, academics have been applying and studying the concept for many years. It means reducing or mitigating the effects of a cognitive bias. It’s not the same as persuasion, of course, but when targeting an audience that holds a cognitive bias, it may at least open the door to persuasion.
The idea of debiasing is important to the legal communicator. For example, in a case in which your client didn’t take an action that would have only been advantageous in retrospect, you’ll want to reduce the influence of hindsight bias. You might be able to strike a few obvious “Monday morning quarterbacks” during jury selection, but on the assumption that voir dire won’t be a perfect remedy, you will still need a way of mitigating the effects of that bias so that the jury can base their verdicts on the facts that were available at the time. The study of debiasing avoids the extreme in thinking that debiasing is impossible because biases are too unconscious to ever be addressed, and also avoids the other extreme in thinking that bias mitigation is easy and all one has to do is ask the jury to set aside their biases. The truth is somewhere in between: Mitigating the influence of a bias is difficult and will not always be successful, but courtroom persuaders need to try. In coming posts, I plan to delve into some of the research on debiasing, but in this post, I will sketch out the general idea in the form of three main principles of debiasing.
The Three Main Principles of Debiasing
Awareness: It is Better to Know
The first principle is a simple one: It is better to know about the bias than to not know about it. On its own, it isn’t always enough to just be aware, but some awareness helps. This is why defense attorneys often talk about needing to hear both sides in order to combat a “first impressions” bias following the plaintiff’s opening statement. My own feeling is that it is better to show jurors that they should keep an open mind rather than to just ask for that. But bringing it into awareness is important. For example, I recently wrote about research showing that individuals are more sensitized and resistant to false claims after playing an online game in which they take on the role of propagandists.
Meta-Cognition: Thinking About Thinking Helps
Meta-cognition, or the ability to actively think about how one is thinking, is another tool in debiasing. An individual who is not just aware of a bias, but also actively attuned to their own thought processes, is going to be more resistant to flawed thinking. This is a reason why persuaders often want to slow down the audience’s processing, for example, inviting them to see themselves as investigators as a guard against jumping to a conclusion that initially seems obvious. I’ve written about one technique for encouraging meta-cognition called “consider the opposite,” in which you ask those assessing an argument to think about how they would evaluate it if it pointed to the opposite conclusion. For example, would a climate change skeptic still find an article’s methodology to be reliable if it showed that climate change was happening? Another technique is to ask someone to imagine how a situation would look when viewed by another.
Manner: Easier Communication Invites Fewer Biases
Essentially, biases are shortcuts, and people rely on shortcuts when they feel they need to. When faced with perceived complexity or incongruity, they will fall back on their pre-packaged conclusions or their biases. For that reason, improving the manner of your communication — making it easier to attend to, to understand, and to believe – also helps to reduce the influence of bias. One recent article in Effectiviology references research showing that simply presenting information in easily understood charts helped to reduce the bias of anecdotal reasoning. Part of this preference for simpler communication hearkens back to Occam’s Razor, or the idea that the simpler explanation seems to be more likely to be true. That, itself, is a bias, of course, but it is a useful one in the sense that if you can streamline your accurate argument, making it easier to understand while still keeping it true to the evidence, then you are dramatically increasing the chances that your audience will accept it instead of relying on their own mental shortcuts or biases.
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Other Posts on Bias: