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Analysis of Competing Hypotheses

🧠 Psychology By CampusDown Wiki Editorial Team Last updated
Quick answer: ACH lays out every plausible explanation and asks which hypotheses the evidence contradicts, favoring the one with the least disconfirming evidence. It was designed to counter confirmation bias.
Contents
  1. 1. Background
  2. 2. Eight steps
  3. 3. Strengths and limits
  4. 4. References

Background

Analysts tend to seek evidence for the first hypothesis that comes to mind. Heuer catalogued these cognitive limits and proposed ACH as a procedure that forces comparison among hypotheses.

Eight steps

  1. Identify all possible hypotheses.
  2. List significant evidence and arguments.
  3. Build a matrix of hypotheses and evidence and rate consistency.
  4. Drop evidence with no diagnostic value.
  5. Draw tentative conclusions by trying to disprove hypotheses.
  6. Check how much the conclusion rests on a few critical items.
  7. Report the relative likelihood of all hypotheses.
  8. Identify milestones that would change the judgment.

Strengths and limits

  • Focuses on disconfirming rather than confirming evidence.
  • Leaves an audit trail for review and debate.
  • Fails if the hypothesis set is incomplete or evidence is deceptive; experiments show only limited bias reduction.

References

  1. Heuer, R. J., Jr. (1999). Psychology of Intelligence Analysis. Center for the Study of Intelligence, CIA.
  2. Heuer, R. J., Jr., & Pherson, R. H. (2010). Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis. CQ Press.
  3. Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175-220.
  4. Dhami, M. K., Belton, I. K., & Mandel, D. R. (2019). The analysis of competing hypotheses in intelligence analysis. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 33(6), 1080-1090.

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This article was last updated on October 15, 2026. It is based on widely recognized original works and textbooks; when citing it in a paper, please check the original sources listed in the references.