Chinese College Students' Cognitive Biases Toward Suicide Prevention and Associated Strategies to Improve Life Education

ABSTRACT Life education is an essential element of suicide prevention in colleges. However, the existing practice of life education in China may be insufficient to match the new spectrum of students' knowledge needs. The study exemplified the participants' responses to common suicide myths with a 3‐year follow‐up investigation (Study 1), and the optimal strategies individuals chose to manage the people in crisis in a hypothetical scenario (Study 2). The results revealed that generally, college students in China have mature cognitive attitudes toward suicide‐related issues, and have systematic structural representations of crisis intervention. However, there are some prominent cognitive biases, mainly focusing on concerns in the process of communication and evaluation, difficulty in considering suicide as a complex moral phenomenon, and insufficient awareness of problem orientation in crisis interventions. To match the students' new cognitive changes and modern education's higher moral requirements, the optimization direction should focus on the response to students' personalized cognitive reality by adding meta‐suicidology reflection, learning ethical reduction in case analysis, and cultivating problem‐solving skills.