Activating a mental simulation mind-set through generation of alternatives: Implications for debiasing in related and unrelated domains

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• 作者：Hirt ; Edward R. ; Kardes ; Frank R. ; Markman ; Keith D.
• 关键词：Debiasing ; Need for structure ; Accessibility experiences ; Mental simulation ; Heuristics and biases
• 刊名：Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
• 出版年：2004
• 出版时间：May, 2004
• 年：2004
• 卷：40
• 期：3
• 页码：374-383
• 全文大小：280 K

文摘

Encouraging people to consider multiple alternatives appears to be a useful debiasing technique for reducing many biases (explanation, hindsight, and overconfidence), if the generation of alternatives is experienced as easy. The present research tests whether these alternative generation procedures induce a mental simulation mind-set (cf. ), such that debiasing in one domain transfers to debias judgments in unrelated domains. The results indeed demonstrated that easy alternative generation tasks not only debiased judgments in the same domain but also generalized to debias judgments in unrelated domains, provided that participants were low in the need for structure. The alternative generation tasks (even when they were easy to perform) showed no evidence of activating a mental simulation mind-set in individuals high in need for structure, as these individuals displayed no transfer effects. Implications of the results for understanding the role of the need for structure, ease of generation, and mental simulation mind-set activation for debiasing are discussed.