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. This article identifies elements relevant to this debate.