Playing Devil’s Advocate: A Conceptual Replication of Hirt et al. (2003)

In the field of psychology, it is important that we foster unbiased judgments in our students and encourage them to engage with material on a critical level. The proposed study is a conceptual replication of Hirt et al. (2003), investigating whether considering alternative hypotheses about the results reduces explanation and overconfidence biases for questions about psychological research. Our proposed replication will also consider whether the benefits of counterfactual thinking were transferable, meaning once individuals are prompted to think counterfactually in one domain, they should show reduced biases when considering an unrelated domain. If these debiasing effects generalize to psychological information, and show transfer across a variety of psychological research, they could play an important role in training psychology students.