INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCE AND DEBIASING STRATEGIES IN THINKING BIASES AND ATTITUDE POLARIZATION

Abstract

Most consequential decisions are made by more than two people. People frequently argue with each other to make better decisions. However, most decision making research usually only involves small purchases and individual decisions. The lacking of investigation in high-cognition decisions and argumentative settings is the motivation of this research. Researchers studying decision making have largely focused on how the decisions that people make are affected by task characteristics, and how labile decisions are with respect to situational factors. However, the fact that many preferences are constructed does not imply that all constructions are equally good. That people differ from each other in thinking is obvious. How and why they differ is less clear. Therefore, the first two studies are foundational studies in order to find out the most important and germane individual difference factor that may be the best predictor of thinking ability, including argument generation quality, evaluation ability, and debiasing ability. I found that logical reasoning ability is the best predictor of both thinking and debiasing ability. Argumentative Theory (Mercier & Sperber, 2011) claims that when reasoning is used in argumentative contexts, the confirmation bias contributes to an efficient form of division of cognitive labor, and then lead to better decisions and attitude depolarization. In study 3, I provided implication evidence to show that either arguing with the other person or viewing arguments from the opposite perspective may lead to attitude depolarization. Most interestingly, individual differences did moderate the main effects.