Confirmation bias phenomenon is known as a tendency of people to prefer information that supports their expectations. European Social Survey Round 4 rotating module (Svallfors et al., 2007) gives opportunity to demonstrate that if people expect some development in their personal lives in future, it has an impact (e.g., confirmation bias) on the way they perceive and interpret the present situation, the conditions of their life.
Often, the decision-making situation is unclear, and we do not have enough relevant information. In this case we use shortcuts, which can lead to cognitive biases. Cognitive biases can affect our decision-making processes, and we are not able to make the decision in an unbiased way. They are present in a wide range of situations, and they can affect our job, relationships, and decisions about investments. Larrick (2004) defined three kinds of debiasing. The first type of debiasing interventions is motivational practices such as incentives or accountability. The second type of debiasing interventions involves cognitive methods like considering the opposite method, training or counterfactual priming. The third type of debiasing interventions is modern technologies such as the pros and cons lists or group decision-making. The aim of our study was to investigate the effectiveness of counterfactual priming, as a cognitive intervention, in reducing three cognitive biases: confirmation bias, as the tendency to search for information in line with our assumptions, the status quo bias, as the preference of the current state, and the attribution effect, as the tendency to attribute behaviour based more on personality than on situational context.
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