Critical thinking classes can reduce common biases: results from a field experiment
Critical thinking classes can reduce common biases: results from a field experiment
Critical thinking classes are ubiquitous in U.S. college curricula. One of their aims is to teach good reasoning skills. To date, there is little systematic evidence that they do this. We report the results of a field experiment (N =397) that compared undergraduate critical thinking classes taught in a philosophy department to other undergraduate philosophy classes. The results suggest that an appropriately designed critical thinking class can dramatically reduce common biases in judgment and decision making: honoring sunk costs, inferring causation from correlation, ignoring regression to the mean, and overlooking opportunity costs. The size of the debiasing effects were substantial (Cohen’s d > 0.80) and persisted at least 16 months after the class ended.
Bishop, Michael
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Feltz, Adam
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Conway, Paul
765aaaf9-173f-44cf-be9a-c8ffbb51e286
Bishop, Michael
9a72d037-251d-4acd-aebf-016dd3595108
Feltz, Adam
dda365f2-4919-4e66-a4bd-cb064a750a3d
Conway, Paul
765aaaf9-173f-44cf-be9a-c8ffbb51e286
Bishop, Michael, Feltz, Adam and Conway, Paul
(2026)
Critical thinking classes can reduce common biases: results from a field experiment.
Journal of Applied Psychology.
(In Press)
Abstract
Critical thinking classes are ubiquitous in U.S. college curricula. One of their aims is to teach good reasoning skills. To date, there is little systematic evidence that they do this. We report the results of a field experiment (N =397) that compared undergraduate critical thinking classes taught in a philosophy department to other undergraduate philosophy classes. The results suggest that an appropriately designed critical thinking class can dramatically reduce common biases in judgment and decision making: honoring sunk costs, inferring causation from correlation, ignoring regression to the mean, and overlooking opportunity costs. The size of the debiasing effects were substantial (Cohen’s d > 0.80) and persisted at least 16 months after the class ended.
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Bishop et al, 2026, Critical Thinking Classes Can Debias Reasoning JAP Preprint
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Accepted/In Press date: 20 January 2026
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Local EPrints ID: 510148
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/510148
ISSN: 0021-9010
PURE UUID: 2cc637ea-3b32-411b-837c-f261b8db7b33
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Date deposited: 18 Mar 2026 17:43
Last modified: 19 Mar 2026 03:07
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Contributors
Author:
Michael Bishop
Author:
Adam Feltz
Author:
Paul Conway
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