Actively seek evidence that would disconfirm your belief

Ask: "What would change my mind?" and then look for exactly that.

Why it works

Confirmation bias causes people to search for, notice, and remember evidence consistent with existing beliefs and to ignore, forget, or discount contradictory evidence. The Bayesian antidote is deliberate disconfirmation search: actively seeking the evidence that would be most likely in the hypothesis-false world. This is cognitively uncomfortable precisely because it works.

How to do it

1. State your current belief explicitly.
2. Ask: "What single piece of evidence, if I found it, would make this belief clearly wrong?"
3. Go look for that evidence deliberately, not incidentally.
4. If you cannot find any such evidence or cannot imagine what it would look like, treat that as a warning sign that the belief is unfalsifiable.

Evidence

Confirmation bias is among the most robustly documented cognitive biases. Deliberate disconfirmation strategies have shown some evidence of reducing it in laboratory tasks, though real-world debiasing is difficult and often only partially successful. (observational)

Debiasing interventions for confirmation bias produce modest and often context-limited effects; the practice helps but does not eliminate the bias.

Sources

• Wason (1960), failure to falsify in a reasoning task, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
• Nickerson (1998), confirmation bias: a ubiquitous phenomenon, Review of General Psychology

Common mistake

Generating a hypothetical "what would change my mind" answer but never actually searching for that evidence — the exercise stays verbal rather than becoming an empirical act.