Mental simulation as a remedy for biased reasoning

Abstract

Prompting mental simulation with a counterfactual scenario has been found to enhance rationality in individuals and groups. Building upon previous findings and the dual-process accounts of reasoning, we hypothesized that debiasing power of mental simulation lies in inhibiting System 1 and facilitating System 2 responses. Therefore, we examined whether counterfactual priming mitigates biased reasoning via changes in cognitive reflection. Each participant of our between-subject experiment (N = 462) solved two out of three tasks on biased reasoning: one before and one after being exposed to the counterfactual scenario. The tasks were designed to elicit selectively seeking hypothesis-confirming evidence, ignoring alternative explanations, and unwillingness to reconsider the default option. In addition, the participants completed two sets of cognitive reflection problems at the beginning and at the end of the experiment. Mental simulation reduced people's tendencies to ignore alternative explanations and hypothesis-disconfirming evidence, and the latter effect was mediated by intuition inhibition.