Reference table
Participant biases in user interviews and how to counter them
A table of seven participant-side cognitive biases in user interviews: social desirability, acquiescence, recency, hindsight, self-serving bias, the availability heuristic and the Hawthorne effect. Each row says what the bias does to answers and how to counter it with question design or other data. Use it when writing questions and when deciding how far to trust what you heard. Koji pairs open questions with structured ones, so you can check what people say against how they answer.
Where this appears
What's in this reference table
| Bias | What it does | How to counter it |
|---|---|---|
| Social desirability bias | People give answers that make them look good | Ask about behavior, and use indirect framings for sensitive topics |
| Acquiescence bias | People agree with statements whatever they say | Use forced-choice or scale questions instead of yes or no |
| Recency bias | The latest experience outweighs the rest | Ask about a set timeframe, like the last month |
| Hindsight bias | Past decisions get retold as more rational than they were | Anchor on specific decision moments and ask for artifacts |
| Self-serving bias | Wins are theirs, failures belong to outside factors | Ask about outcomes separately from questions about your product |
| Availability heuristic | Vivid, recent examples crowd out the systemic ones | Follow open questions with a ranking of common issues |
| Hawthorne effect | People behave differently when they know they're watched | Use unmoderated tests and in-product analytics to measure behavior |
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Free to use in your docs, decks and posts under CC BY 4.0, as long as you credit Koji with a link to this page. To embed it, paste this into your page:
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<a href="https://www.koji.so/visuals/participant-side-cognitive-biases-user-interviews-table"><img src="https://www.koji.so/visuals/participant-side-cognitive-biases-user-interviews-table/participant-side-cognitive-biases-user-interviews-table.png" alt="Table of seven participant-side biases in user interviews, from social desirability and recency bias to the Hawthorne effect, with a countermeasure for each." width="1200" height="981" /></a>
<p>Source: <a href="https://www.koji.so/visuals/participant-side-cognitive-biases-user-interviews-table">Participant biases in user interviews and how to counter them</a>, Koji</p>
