How Can Debiasing Research Aid Efforts to Reduce Discrimination?

Understanding and reducing intergroup discrimination is at the forefront of psychological research. However, efforts to find flexible, scalable, and durable interventions to reduce discrimination have produced only mixed results. In this review, we highlight one potential avenue for developing new strategies for addressing discrimination: adapting prior research on debiasing—the process of lessening bias in judgment errors (e.g., motivated reasoning, overconfidence, the anchoring heuristic). We first introduce a taxonomy for understanding intervention strategies that are common in the debiasing literature, then highlight existing approaches that have already proven successful for decreasing intergroup discrimination. Finally, we draw attention to promising debiasing interventions that have not yet been applied to the context of discrimination. A greater understanding of prior efforts to mitigate judgment biases more generally can expand efforts to reduce discrimination.