Abstract
Cognitive biases such as causal illusions have been related to paranormal and pseudoscientific beliefs and, thus, pose a real threat to the development of adequate critical thinking abilities. We aimed to reduce causal illusions in undergraduates by means of an educational intervention combining training-in-bias and training-in-rules techniques. First, participants directly experienced situations that tend to induce the Barnum effect and the confirmation bias. Thereafter, these effects were explained and examples of their influence over everyday life were provided. Compared to a control group, participants who received the intervention showed diminished causal illusions in a contingency learning task and a decrease in the precognition dimension of a paranormal belief scale. Overall, results suggest that evidence-based educational interventions like the one presented here could be used to significantly improve critical thinking skills in our students.
Highlights
The development of successful debiasing strategies has been argued to be one of the most relevant contributions that Psychology could make to humanity [1]
We considered that the Barnum effect would be strongly and induced in most of the participants, what would help overcoming the “bias blind spot”, and that inducing this effect was appropriate in order to enhance the perceived personal relevance of cognitive biases, as it is applied to everyday situations
The goal of this study was to develop a debiasing intervention aimed to diminish the influence of cognitive biases over everyday reasoning and to promote a critical perspective in relation to pseudoscientific and superstitious beliefs
Summary
The development of successful debiasing strategies has been argued to be one of the most relevant contributions that Psychology could make to humanity [1]. Cognitive biases have been related to various threats to human welfare including the acquisition and persistence of superstitious and pseudoscientific beliefs [3,4,5]; the emergence of group stereotypes and prejudices [6]; ideological extremism [1]; medical diagnostic errors [7,8]; or spurious therapeutic effectiveness [9] They might contribute to psychopathological conditions such as social phobia [10], depression [11], eating disorders [12] or to the development of psychotic-like experiences in healthy adults [13]
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