Blog
March 26, 2025

Reverse Hypothesis

Confirmation bias is real! A useful technique for minimising it is to work from a reverse hypothesis. But what is confirmation bias, and what is a reverse hypothesis?

Groups of people gathered around tables in a workshop
  • Confirmation bias is our tendency to favour information that confirms our existing beliefs while rejecting information that challenges them. As researchers, this behaviour can sometimes lead us to downplay results that don’t ‘feel’ correct.

  • A reverse hypothesis involves recognising our expectations and designing our research to disprove them, helping to reduce confirmation bias.

Example: If I expect most of our customers to be confident using a smartphone, I might design my research to test the hypothesis: "Our customers are not confident with smartphones."