Cognitive bias mitigation is the prevention and reduction of the negative effects of cognitive biases – unconscious, automatic influences on human judgment and decision making that reliably produce reasoning errors.

Coherent, comprehensive theories of cognitive bias mitigation are lacking. This article describes debiasing tools, methods, proposals and other initiatives, in academic and professional disciplines concerned with the efficacy of human reasoning, associated with the concept of cognitive bias mitigation; most address mitigation tacitly rather than explicitly.

A long-standing debate regarding human decision making bears on the development of a theory and practice of bias mitigation. This debate contrasts the rational economic agent standard for decision making versus one grounded in human social needs and motivations. The debate also contrasts the methods used to analyze and predict human decision making, i.e. formal analysis emphasizing intellectual capacities versus heuristics emphasizing emotional states.

A large body of evidence has established that a defining characteristic of cognitive biases is that they manifest automatically and unconsciously over a wide range of human reasoning, so even those aware of the existence of the phenomenon are unable to detect, let alone mitigate, their manifestation via awareness only.

There are few studies explicitly linking cognitive biases to real-world incidents with highly negative outcomes. Examples:

There are numerous investigations of incidents determining that human error was central to highly negative potential or actual real-world outcomes, in which manifestation of cognitive biases is a plausible component. Examples:

Each of the approximately 250 cognitive biases known to date can also produce negative outcomes in our everyday lives, though rarely as serious as in the examples above. An illustrative selection, recounted in multiple studies:

An increasing number of academic and professional disciplines are identifying means of cognitive bias mitigation. What follows is a characterization of the assumptions, theories, methods and results, in disciplines concerned with the efficacy of human reasoning, that plausibly bear on a theory and/or practice of cognitive bias mitigation. In most cases this is based on explicit reference to cognitive biases or their mitigation, in others on unstated but self-evident applicability. This characterization is organized along lines reflecting historical segmentation of disciplines, though in practice there is a significant amount of overlap.