Consider the Opposite

Overview

Lord, Lepper & Preston (1984, JPSP): telling people to "be unbiased and objective" does nothing — biased assimilation of evidence continues unchanged. But one instruction reliably works: "ask yourself at each step whether you would have made the same high or low evaluations had exactly the same study produced results on the other side of the issue." Generating the opposite case isn't a virtue exercise; it mechanically forces retrieval of evidence and interpretations your confirmation-driven search skipped (Wason, 1960: people test hypotheses by seeking confirming instances by default).

Objectivity is not a stance you adopt; it's a specific counterfactual you compute.

When to Use

• Every source you check agrees with you (search-term bias: you searched for the confirmation)
• Interpreting ambiguous evidence — logs, user feedback, benchmark results — that "fits"
• A diagnosis felt right immediately and subsequent checks kept "verifying" it
• Evaluating a study/article/benchmark whose conclusion you like

The Procedure