Here is a paper showing the potential practical utility of detecting and reducing biases: Confirmation bias in criminal investigations by O’Brien and Ellsworth. In an experiment subjects read a police file and were asked halfway through about their hypotheses of who the murderer was; practically everybody named the obvious suspect. On completing the entire file, where a second and stronger suspect emerges in the later half, they still tended to suspect the first guy. In a second experiment the subjects were asked to generate counter-hypotheses about why their suspect might be innocent, and this reduced the confirmation bias.