A Crowdsourced Study of Visual Strategies for Mitigating Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias that involves seeking and prioritizing information that conforms to a pre-existing view or hypothesis that can negatively affect the decision-making process. We investigate the manifestation and mitigation of confirmation bias with an emphasis on the use of visualization. In a series of Amazon Mechanical Turk studies, participants selected evidence that supported or refuted a given hypothesis. We demonstrated the presence of confirmation bias and investigated the use of five simple visual representations, using color, positional, and length encodings for mitigating this bias. We found that at worst, visualization had no effect in the amount of confirmation bias present, and at best, it was successful in mitigating the bias. We discuss these results in light of factors that can complicate visual debiasing in non-experts.