Recognizing biased reasoning
It is well established that our thinking can often be biased, but the exact cognitive mechanisms underlying these biases are still being debated. Current research is based on recent studies showing that biased reasoners often seem to be aware that their reasoning is wrong. They show signs of conflict detection. One important drawback of this study is that the effects of conflict detection have only been investigated in traditional problem-solving tasks, where people need to decide for themselves. However, in many reasoning situations, people are already faced with decisions made by others. Therefore, the present study (N = 159) investigated whether conflict detection occurs not only during reasoning in problem-solving tasks (i.e., decision making), but also in vignette tasks in which participants need to evaluate the decisions of others. We analyzed participants' conflict detection sensitivity on measures of confidence and response time. The results showed that conflict detection occurred in both decision making and decision evaluation, as indicated by a decrease in confidence. The response time index appeared to be an unreliable indicator of conflict detection in the new task. These findings are very relevant for studying reasoning in situations where the recognition of reasoning errors is important. For example, in education where teachers must provide feedback on students' reasoning.
EVA M. Jansen Samuel B. Velinga Vimde Neys B Tamaravan Gog A
Faculty of Education, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
University of Paris, UMR CNRS8240LaPsyDÉ, France
Received September 28, 2020; revised April 20, 2021; accepted April 26, 2021; available online May 11, 2021.
Commentary
This study focused on people's biased thinking, but it also described detecting whether or not people accept other people's decisions based on how they react to them.
Briefly, it was stated that one of the characteristics of forcing biased thoughts on the other person is to give a "long" explanation to the other person. When you are biased and do not take into account the other person's opinion, you need to "persuade" the other person, and this characteristic can be observed. As for the later characteristics, the author felt that they are difficult to detect in reality, so he omitted mentioning them, but he said, "People with biased ideas are aware of their own biases and are also aware that they are wrong.
