Adieu Bias: Debiasing Intuitions Among French Speakers

Nina Franiatte (1, 2) , Esther Boissin (1) , Alexandra Delmas (2) , Wim De Neys (1)

1 LaPsyDÉ - UMR 8240 - Laboratoire de psychologie du développement et de l'éducation de l'enfant
2 onepoint - département R&D onepoint sud-ouest

Recent debiasing studies have shown that a short, plain-English explanation of the correct solution strategy can improve reasoning performance. However, these studies have predominantly focused on English-speaking populations, who were tested with problem contents designed for an English-speaking test environment. Here we explore whether the key findings of previous debiasing studies can be extended to native French speakers living in continental Europe (France). We ran a training session with a battery of three reasoning tasks (i.e., base-rate neglect, conjunction fallacy, and bat-and-ball) on 147 native French speakers. We used a two-response paradigm in which participants first gave an initial intuitive response, under time pressure and cognitive load, and then gave a final response after deliberation. Results showed a clear training effect, as early as the initial (intuitive) stage. Immediately after training, most participants solved the problems correctly, without the need for a deliberation process. The findings confirm that the intuitive debiasing training effect extends to native French speakers.

Keywords: Reasoning; Heuristics and biases; Debiasing; Intuition; French

Domains: Psychology

Nina Franiatte, Esther Boissin, Alexandra Delmas, Wim De Neys. Adieu Bias: Debiasing Intuitions Among French Speakers. Psychologica Belgica, inPress, ⟨10.5334/pb.1260⟩. ⟨hal-04527422v1⟩