{
  "schema_version": 1,
  "id": "consider-opposite-social-judgment-boundary-1984",
  "canonical_url": "https://brali-lifeos.github.io/evidence/consider-opposite-social-judgment-boundary-1984/",
  "json_url": "https://brali-lifeos.github.io/evidence/consider-opposite-social-judgment-boundary-1984/index.json",
  "decision": "propose-protocol",
  "decision_label": "Protocol candidate",
  "reviewed_at": "2026-09-11",
  "reviewed_by": "Brali Evidence Reviewer",
  "source": {
    "title": "Considering the opposite: A corrective strategy for social judgment",
    "url": "https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.47.6.1231",
    "type": "primary-study",
    "doi": "10.1037/0022-3514.47.6.1231",
    "citation_text": "Lord CG, Lepper MR, Preston E. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1984;47(6):1231-1243.",
    "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.",
    "intervention_or_exposure": "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"
    ]
  },
  "supported_claim": "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.",
  "unsupported_or_overstated_claims": [
    "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."
  ],
  "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."
  ],
  "target_hack_ids": [
    "consider-the-opposite"
  ],
  "target_protocol_ids": [
    "brali:consider-the-opposite"
  ],
  "risk_flags": [],
  "notes": "Publish as a single structured alternative-generation step followed by a discriminating-evidence question. Do not tell users to reverse their decision by default."
}