Prompting mental simulation with a counterfactual scenario has been found to enhance rationality in individuals and groups. Building upon previous findings and the dual-process accounts of reasoning, we hypothesized that debiasing power of mental simulation lies in inhibiting System 1 and facilitating System 2 responses. Therefore, we examined whether counterfactual priming mitigates biased reasoning via changes in cognitive reflection. Each participant of our between-subject experiment (N = 462) solved two out of three tasks on biased reasoning: one before and one after being exposed to the counterfactual scenario. The tasks were designed to elicit selectively seeking hypothesis-confirming evidence, ignoring alternative explanations, and unwillingness to reconsider the default option. In addition, the participants completed two sets of cognitive reflection problems at the beginning and at the end of the experiment. Mental simulation reduced people’s tendencies to ignore alternative explanations and hypothesisdisconfirming evidence, and the latter effect was mediated by intuition inhibition.

中文翻译：

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心理模拟作为偏见推理的补救措施

已经发现用反事实情景进行心理模拟可以增强个人和群体的理性。基于先前的发现和推理的双过程解释，我们假设心理模拟的去偏见能力在于抑制系统 1 和促进系统 2 的反应。因此，我们研究了反事实启动是否通过认知反思的变化来减轻有偏见的推理。我们的被试间实验的每个参与者 (N = 462) 解决了三项关于偏见推理的任务中的两项：一项是在暴露于反事实场景之前，一项是在暴露于反事实场景之后。这些任务旨在引发有选择地寻找证实假设的证据，忽略其他解释，以及不愿意重新考虑默认选项。此外，参与者在实验开始和结束时完成了两组认知反思问题。心理模拟减少了人们忽视替代解释和假设否定证据的倾向，而后者的影响是由直觉抑制介导的。