Flexibility mindsets: Reducing biases that result from spontaneous processing

ABSTRACT

Spontaneous (i.e., heuristic, fast, effortless, and associative) processing has clear advantages for human cognition, but it can also elicit undesirable outcomes such as stereotyping and other biases. In the current article, we argue that biased judgements and behaviour that result from spontaneous processing can be reduced by activating various flexibility mindsets. These mindsets are characterised by the consideration of alternatives beyond one’s spontaneous thoughts and behaviours and could, thus, contribute to bias reduction. Research has demonstrated that eliciting flexibility mindsets via goal and cognitive conflicts, counterfactual thinking,, recalling own past flexible thoughts or behaviour, and adopting a promotion focus reduces biases in judgements and behaviour. We summarise evidence for the effectiveness of flexibility mindsets across a wide variety of important phenomena – including creative performance, stereotyping and prejudice, interpersonal behaviour, and decision-making. Finally, we discuss the underlying processes and potential boundary conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive flexibility
• cognitive conflict
• goal conflict
• counterfactual mindset
• stereotyping
• regulatory focus

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Adam K. Fetterman, Nina Hansen, Johann Jacoby, Thomas Kessler, Nadine Knab, Florian Landkammer, Melanie C. Steffens, Ansgar Thiel and numerous student assistants that have been involved in the research summarized here over the years. The reported research has been supported by funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to Kai Sassenberg (SA 800/8-1, SA 800/8-2, SA 800/17-1).

Notes

¹ Reported results are statistically significant unless they are explicitly described as marginal (.05 < p < .10) or descriptive.

² We additionally tested the impact of a second factor on the confirmation bias in the context of hidden profile tasks, namely whether the decision-making task involved an individual or group goal. In the individual goal condition, participants’ individual decision quality or the impression they made on the other group members was said to be the evaluation criterion, whereas in the group goal condition the group decision quality was the evaluation criterion. Given that the effect of individual vs. group goals is irrelevant for the current context, we do neither outline the reasoning nor the results regarding this factor in detail here (for details see Sassenberg et al., 2014). Instead, we exclusively focus on the effect of regulatory focus in the individual goal condition.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [SA800/8-1, 2; SA800/17-1].