Biased judgment and decision making exists in consequential domains such as medicine, law, policy, and business, as well as in everyday life.
[2] At an individual level, people who exhibit less decision bias have more intact social environments, reduced risk of alcohol and drug use, lower childhood delinquency rates, and superior planning and problem solving abilities.
The reason for the lack of more domain-general debiasing was attributed to experts failing to recognize the underlying "deep structure" of problems in different formats and domains.
Weather forecasters are able to predict rain with high accuracy, for example, but show the same overconfidence in their answers to basic trivia questions as other people.
[16] Experiments by Morewedge and colleagues (2015) have found interactive computer games and instructional videos can result in long-term debiasing at a general level.
In a series of experiments, training with interactive computer games that provided players with personalized feedback, mitigating strategies, and practice, reduced six cognitive biases by more than 30% immediately and by more than 20% as long as three months later.
Reference class forecasting is a method for systematically debiasing estimates and decisions, based on what Daniel Kahneman calls the outside view.
According to Kahneman, reference class forecasting is effective for debiasing and "has come a long way" in practical implementation since he originally proposed the idea with Amos Tversky (p. 251).