Debiasing

What is debiasing?

Debiasing means trying to reduce systematic errors in judgment or choice. It needs a standard for what counts as better. Changing a person's behavior is not enough to show that an error was corrected.

Debiasing Strategies and Techniques

Soll, Milkman, and Payne distinguish methods that change the decision maker from methods that change the decision environment. Teaching a useful decision rule is one approach. Changing how information is presented or adding a decision aid is another. Checklists and structured procedures can change the task people face.

Examples of debiasing

• Presenting a probability problem as counts of cases may help someone use information that was already available. The answer can be compared with the correct solution.
• A hiring team might use the same questions and scoring criteria for each candidate. That makes the process more consistent, but the team still needs to test whether its judgments are more valid or fair. A structured interview does not automatically remove affinity bias or halo effects.

Why it matters

A bias label does not tell you which remedy will work. There is no universal rule that changing the environment beats training. The error, task, population, and comparison matter. A method can improve one judgment while leaving other errors untouched.