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Designing a Serious Game “Events” and Investigating the Effectiveness in Modifying Confirmation Bias: A Single Subject Study

Confirmation cognitive bias can lead to systematic errors and problems in interpersonal relationships, professional decisions, and personal judgments in humans [1]. By educating them on how to mitigate this bias, people can become aware of this bias, but they usually recognize it in others and can less effectively eliminate it [5]. By integrating confirmation cognitive bias modification techniques and digital games, people have the opportunity to experience what they have learned and thus empirically and practically become aware of their bias and can replace the logical thinking pattern. The purpose of this research is to develop a method for cognitive bias modification by digital games. The game Events is designed to replace the biased pattern of thinking with logical pattern by an interactive story. Activities a player does in the game include selecting options to continue playing and answering questions to complete the mystery. Twine software was used to design the game. The statistical population of this study consisted of Tabriz University School of Electrical Engineering students who were identified as applying confirmation bias in the Wason test. The research design of this study was a single-subject experimental. The effectiveness of the game was assessed by studying the activity of the subjects in-game and in the pre-test and post-test. Tracking 7 subjects actions and post-test performance showed that the Events game had been able to modify 43% of cognitive bias in individuals.