Parsimony in Bias Research

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Roland Imhoff; Professorin Dr. Aileen Oeberst
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 551294889

One of the essential insights from psychological research is that people’s information processing is often biased. By now, several different biases have been identified and empirically demonstrated. For instance, people overestimate the extent to which their opinions and beliefs are shared, and they apply differential standards in the evaluation of behavior depending on whether it is about a member of their own or another group, just to name a few. For many such biases there are prolific strands of research and for the most part, these strands do not refer to one another, thereby precluding the recognition of shared principles. In a recently published paper, we brought a set of mostly unrelated biases (e.g., bias blind spot, hostile media bias, ego-/ethnocentric bias, outcome bias) together by suggesting that they might share the same “recipe”. Specifically, we proposed that this set of biases is based on prior beliefs plus belief-consistent information processing. Put differently, we raised the question of whether a finite number of very different biases – at the process level – represent variants of “confirmation bias”, or peoples’ tendency to process information in a way that is consistent with their prior beliefs. What varies between different biases in this view, is essentially the specific belief that guides information processing. More importantly, we proposed that different biases even share the same underlying belief and differ only in the specific outcome of information processing that is assessed (i.e., the dependent variable), thus tapping into different manifestations of the same latent information processing. In other words, we proposed a model that suffices to explain several different biases and, thus, suggested a more parsimonious approach compared to current theoretical explanations of these biases. The proposed framework does not only provide an integrative perspective, however, but also generated several novel hypotheses. The main goal of the present project is to test these novel hypotheses empirically. Based on a pilot study that confirmed the default existence of our proposed fundamental beliefs, we aim to test five hypotheses that relate to (1) a uniform countermeasure for seventeen different biases, (2) six fundamental beliefs as organizing latent factors for seventeen biases, (3) the belief to make correct assessments to be mirrored also in biases based on other beliefs, (4) biased information processing to nourish the fundamental belief of making correct assessments, and (5) an ingroup bias for groups people neither belong to nor identify with but which they believe to be good. Four work packages including a total of 35 sub studies (planned total N = 12.550) are conducted to test these hypotheses.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants