How Can Debiasing Research Aid Efforts to Reduce Discrimination?

Abstract

Academic Abstract Understanding and reducing intergroup discrimination is at the forefront of psychological research. However, efforts to find flexible, scalable, and durable interventions to reduce discrimination have produced only mixed results. In this review, we highlight one potential avenue for developing new strategies for addressing discrimination: adapting prior research on debiasing—the process of lessening bias in judgment errors (e.g., motivated reasoning, overconfidence, and the anchoring heuristic). We first introduce a taxonomy for understanding intervention strategies that are common in the debiasing literature, then highlight existing approaches that have already proven successful for decreasing intergroup discrimination. Finally, we draw attention to promising debiasing interventions that have not yet been applied to the context of discrimination. A greater understanding of prior efforts to mitigate judgment biases more generally can expand efforts to reduce discrimination. Public Abstract Scientists studying intergroup biases are often concerned with lessening discrimination (unequal treatment of one social group versus another), but many interventions for reducing such biased behavior have weak or limited evidence. In this review article, we argue one productive avenue for reducing discrimination comes from adapting interventions in a separate field—judgment and decision-making—that has historically studied “debiasing”: the ways people can lessen the unwanted influence of irrelevant information on decision-making. While debiasing research shares several commonalities with research on reducing intergroup discrimination, many debiasing interventions have relied on methods that differ from those deployed in the intergroup bias literature. We review several instances where debiasing principles have been successfully applied toward reducing intergroup biases in behavior and introduce other debiasing techniques that may be well-suited for future efforts in lessening discrimination.