Does “putting on your thinking cap” reduce myside bias in evaluation of scientific evidence?

Abstract

The desire to maintain current beliefs can lead individuals to evaluate contrary evidence more critically than consistent evidence. We test whether priming individuals’ scientific reasoning skills reduces this often-observed myside bias, when people evaluate scientific evidence about which they have prior positions. We conducted three experiments in which participants read a news-style article about a study that either supported or opposed their attitudes regarding the Affordable Care Act. We manipulated whether participants completed a test posing scientific reasoning problems before or after reading the article and evaluating the evidence that it reported. Consistent with previous research, we found that participants were biased in favor of evidence consistent with their prior attitudes regarding the Affordable Care Act. Priming individuals’ scientific reasoning skills reduced myside bias only when accompanied by direct instructions to apply those skills to the task at hand. We discuss the processes contributing to biased evaluation of scientific evidence.

Keywords:

• Judgment
• reasoning
• scientific communication
• myside bias

Acknowledgements

Portions of the research have been presented at the 2016 Society for Judgment and Decision Making annual meeting, the associated Preconference on Debiasing Decision Makers, and the 2016 Society for Risk Analysis annual meeting. The authors thank Stephen Broomell and Andrew Parker for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Studies 1 and 2 were conducted while Caitlin Drummond was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University; Study 3 was conducted while she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation [grant NCSE-1537364, to the authors; grant SES-0949710, to the Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making]; and by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Science. Caitlin Drummond was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship [grant DGE-1252522]. Study 1 was also partially supported by a Qualtrics Behavioral Research Grant awarded to Caitlin Drummond.