consider the opposite
This evidence decision is attached to the maintained Brali entry above. The public protocol may be narrowed, reviewed, or kept practical according to the decision.
Evidence Ledger · Protocol candidate · reviewed 2026-09-11
Considering the opposite: A corrective strategy for social judgment
The reviewed source can support a conservative practical protocol.
Brali decision: Protocol candidate. This page summarizes a reviewed evidence boundary; it does not reproduce the source and it does not turn one paper into a universal prescription.
What the source supports
When a judgment is vulnerable to one-sided evidence processing, deliberately generating an opposed possibility can reduce bias on some tasks more effectively than simply telling oneself to be fair or unbiased. Brali can use this as a concrete pre-decision check while preserving the possibility that the original conclusion remains correct.
What it does not establish
- Consider-the-opposite eliminates confirmation bias.
- The technique transfers automatically to every real-world decision.
- The opposite conclusion should be preferred once generated.
- More counterarguments are always better.
- The strategy should be used for every trivial or reversible choice.
Important limitations
- Classic laboratory/social-judgment evidence from undergraduate samples.
- Only two focal task domains were tested in the original article.
- Long-term persistence and broad transfer were not established.
- The authors note that considering the opposite can in some circumstances overweight disconfirming evidence and create a different form of partiality.
- Demand characteristics and task-specific effects remain possible.
Source context
Considering the opposite: A corrective strategy for social judgment
- Source type: primary-study
- Design: Two conceptually parallel experiments manipulating whether participants considered possibilities opposed to their current beliefs or impressions, compared with alternative instructions including generic fairness/unbiasedness prompts.
- Population: 150 undergraduate participants across two experiments.
- Exposure / intervention: Explicit consider-the-opposite instructions or materials designed to make opposite possibilities salient during evaluation of ambiguous evidence and hypothesis testing about personality impressions.
- Outcomes: Biased assimilation of evidence; Attitude polarization; Biased hypothesis testing in social judgment
Citation: Lord CG, Lepper MR, Preston E. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1984;47(6):1231-1243.
DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.47.6.1231
What this changes in Brali
Editorial note: Publish as a single structured alternative-generation step followed by a discriminating-evidence question. Do not tell users to reverse their decision by default.
Use the boundary, not just the headline
When an AI agent or a person retrieves this decision, preserve both the supported claim and the unsupported or overstated claims. Dropping the boundary would turn a reviewed source into a stronger claim than Brali actually maintains.
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