Boosting debiasing: Impact of repeated training on reasoning

Adieu Bias: Debiasing Intuitions Among French Speakers

“…By and large, similar initial and final response tendencies were observed for each individual task. If anything, as previously found in Franiatte et al ( 2024 ), the training effect tended to be somewhat less pronounced for the base-rate task. However, in this task, participants’ pre-intervention performance was also already higher than for the others.…”

“…Additionally, we conducted an exploratory analysis to compare our study’s reasoning performance with the similar debiasing study—adopting the same tasks and design—conducted by Franiatte et al ( 2024 ) on native English speakers. Overall, we observed a similar training effect in the two samples (see Figure S3 in Supplementary Material Section H).…”

“…Recent successful debiasing studies have shown that a short training intervention can often help people to reason more accurately. This intervention consists of a plain-English explanation about the correct solution strategy and the typical biased response to a reasoning problem (e.g., Boissin et al, 2021 , 2022 ; Claidière et al, 2017 ; Franiatte et al, 2024 ; Hoover & Healy, 2017 ; Morewedge et al, 2015 ; Purcell et al, 2020 ; Trouche et al, 2014 ). Typically, in these studies, reasoners who received the intervention are able to produce correct responses to structurally similar problems afterwards.…”

“…Given that the ‘trained intuitor’ debiasing approach has important applied and theoretical implications, further validation is needed. However, a critical limitation of (debiasing) training studies is their predominant focus on (native) English speakers, who were tested with problem contents designed for an English-speaking test environment (e.g., Boissin et al, 2021 , 2022 , 2023a ; Franiatte et al, 2024 ; Hoover & Healy, 2017 ; Morewedge et al, 2015 ; Purcell et al, 2020 ). Such a limited scope of (most) psychological studies has been questioned by various scholars: They pointed out the lack of representation of diverse populations and languages, urging for greater inclusivity in scientific research (e.g., Arnett, 2008 ; Blasi et al, 2022 ; Huettig & Ferreira, 2023 ; Thalmayer et al, 2021 ).…”

“…We used the exact same training procedure and problem test battery as in previous debiasing work (see Franiatte et al, 2024 ). The only difference was that our participants were native French speakers and all our problem content was adapted to French.…”