Cognitive Bias Mitigation

Cognitive bias mitigation is the prevention and reduction of the negative effects of cognitive biases, the unconscious and automatic influences on human judgment and decision making that reliably produce errors in reasoning. Researchers note that a defining feature of these biases is that they operate automatically and unconsciously across a wide range of reasoning tasks, so that even people who are aware a bias exists are often unable to detect, let alone prevent, its influence through awareness alone. No single, comprehensive theory of bias mitigation yet exists, but academic and professional fields concerned with the quality of human reasoning have proposed a range of debiasing tools and methods, and the field remains shaped by a long-running debate over whether human decision making should be measured against a standard of pure rational self-interest or one that also accounts for social needs and motivations.