Does giving reasons pro and contra reduce biased decision-making in legal contexts?

What is it about?

Decisions are probably biased if we base them on less than all relevant information. To counteract bad decision-making so-called "debiasing technique" might help. But there is little empirically sound research on the effectiveness of such techniques. To improve our knowledge, this article studies the effectiveness of "giving reasons for and against" in a mock legal scenario among a sample of Swedish professional and lay judges.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

We find low degrees of bias in our sample, and but a small debiasing effect. To empirically study the effect of this debiasing techniques in a legal context, future research should induce a stronger bias and/or work with a much larger sample.