Confirmation Bias Challenge
The Confirmation Bias Challenge is an engaging workshop where participants learn about confirmation bias and its impact on decision-making. Through interactive exercises and discussions, teams explore strategies to mitigate the effects of confirmation bias and promote more objective and evidence-based decision-making.
Learning Objective
Participants experience how confirmation bias quietly filters the evidence they accept, then practise techniques for making more objective, evidence-led decisions.
How to Play
Setup
- Give teams a customer-insight brief that contains both confirming and disconfirming evidence for a popular assumption.
- Provide a decision worksheet with space for 'evidence for' and 'evidence against'.
- Appoint a 'devil's advocate' role in each team.
Rules of play
- Teams first decide quickly, then must actively argue the opposite of their conclusion.
- The devil's advocate scores points for every piece of disconfirming evidence the team initially skipped.
- Teams revise their decision only if the counter-evidence genuinely warrants it.
- Compare initial versus revised decisions across the room.
Debrief
- What disconfirming evidence did you unconsciously discount the first time?
- How did being forced to argue the opposite change your confidence?
- Where in your CX decisions do you cherry-pick data that confirms what you already believe?
CX Principle Reinforced
Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek, interpret and remember information that supports existing beliefs. In CX it shows up as teams reading customer feedback selectively to justify decisions already made.
Building in a structured search for disconfirming evidence — a devil's advocate, a pre-mortem — is one of the most reliable ways to de-bias a team's judgement.
Format
- Participants: 4-12
- Facilitators: 1
- Seniority: Medium
- Level: Medium
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