The primary objection to debiasing-training interventions is a lack of evidence that they improve decision making in field settings, where reminders of bias are absent. We gave graduate students in...
In this article, we report on a serious game development approach, characterized by combining theory-based design with an iterative development strategy guided by experimental test and evaluation. We describe two serious games that teach the mitigation of cognitive biases (human tendencies to commit systematic errors in thinking that lead to irrational judgments). Cognitive biases tend to be deeply ingrained and early attempts to reduce biases with training have met with little success. We addre...
Across consequential attributions of attitudes, ability, emotions, and morality, people make correspondent inferences. People infer stable personality characteristics from others’ behavior, even when that behavior is caused by situational factors. We examined the structure of correspondent inferences and report the development and validation of an instrument measuring individual differences in this correspondence bias (a Neglect of External Demands scale, or “NED”). The NED is internally consist...
Last. Karim S. Kassam(CMU: Carnegie Mellon University)H-Index: 17
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People exhibit a bias blind spot: they are less likely to detect bias in themselves than in others. We report the development and validation of an instrument to measure individual differences in the propensity to exhibit the bias blind spot that is unidimensional, internally consistent, has high test-retest reliability, and is discriminated from measures of intelligence, decision-making ability, and personality traits related to self-esteem, self-enhancement, and self-presentation. The scale is ...
Last. Karim S. Kassam(CMU: Carnegie Mellon University)H-Index: 17
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From failures of intelligence analysis to misguided beliefs about vaccinations, biased judgment and decision making contributes to problems in policy, business, medicine, law, education, and private life. Early attempts to reduce decision biases with training met with little success, leading scientists and policy makers to focus on debiasing by using incentives and changes in the presentation and elicitation of decisions. We report the results of two longitudinal experiments that found medium to...
#2Eric Stone(UPenn: University of Pennsylvania)H-Index: 5
Last. Philip E. Tetlock(UPenn: University of Pennsylvania)H-Index: 99
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Across a wide range of tasks, research has shown that people make poor probabilistic predictions of future events. Recently, the U.S. Intelligence Community sponsored a series of forecasting tournaments designed to explore the best strategies for generating accurate subjective probability estimates of geopolitical events. In this article, we describe the winning strategy: culling off top performers each year and assigning them into elite teams of superforecasters. Defying expectations of regress...
The optimal moment to address the question of how to improve human decision making has arrived. Thanks to fifty years of research by judgment and decision making scholars, psychologists have developed a detailed picture of the ways in which human judgment is bounded. This paper argues that the time has come to focus attention on the search for strategies that will improve bounded judgment because decision making errors are costly and are growing more costly, decision makers are receptive, and ac...
#1Shane Frederick(MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology)H-Index: 27
This paper introduces a three-item "Cognitive Reflection Test" (CRT) as a simple measure of one type of cognitive ability—the ability or disposition to reflect on a question and resist reporting the first response that comes to mind. The author will show that CRT scores are predictive of the types of choices that feature prominently in tests of decision-making theories, like expected utility theory and prospect theory. Indeed, the relation is sometimes so strong that the preferences themselves e...
Confirmation bias, as the term is typically used in the psychological literature, connotes the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a h...
Some authors questioned the ecological validity of judgmental biases demonstrated in the laboratory. One objection to these demonstrations is that evolutionary pressures would have rendered such maladaptive behaviors extinct if they had any impact in the «real world» attempt to show that even beneficial adaptations may have costs. I extend this argument to propose three types of judgment errors-strategy-based errors, association-based errors, and psychophysical based errors-each of which is a co...
Ss were trained on the law of large numbers in a given domain through the use of example problems. They were then tested either on that domain or on another domain either immediately or after a 2-week delay.
Last. Fred Paas(UOW: University of Wollongong)H-Index: 88
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The aim of this experiment was to examine the effect of different instructional strategies on student teachers’ confirmation bias. Confirmation bias refers to the selectivity in finding and using evidence that fits one’s own beliefs or hypotheses while neglecting evidence that is opposite to one’s own beliefs or hypotheses (Nickerson, 1998). Dutch student teachers (n = 141) took a confirmation bias pre-test and were then randomly assigned to three conditions; teaching on video (TOV), preparing t...
Abstract Observational learning can debias judgment and decision making. One-shot observational learning-based training interventions (akin to “hot seating”) can produce reductions in cognitive biases in the laboratory (i.e., anchoring, representativeness, and social projection), and successfully teach a decision rule that increases advice taking in a weight on advice paradigm (i.e., the averaging principle). These interventions improve judgment, rule learning, and advice taking more than practi...
This paper argues that open-mindedness is a corrective virtue. It serves as a corrective to the epistemic vice of confirmation bias. Specifically, open-mindedness is the epistemically virtuous disposition to resist the negative effects of confirmation bias on our ability to reason well and to evaluate evidence and arguments. As part of the defense and presentation of our account, we explore four discussions of open-mindedness in the recent literature. All four approaches have strengths and shed ...
Trait impressions from faces influence many consequential decisions even in situations in which they have poor diagnostic value and in which decisions should not be based on a person’s appearance. Here, we test (a) whether people rely on facial appearance when making legal sentencing decisions and (b) whether two types of interventions—educating decision-makers and changing the accessibility of facial information—reduces the influence of facial stereotypes. We first introduce a novel legal decis...
This paper employs theory of normal organizational wrongdoing and investigates the joint effects of management tone and the slippery slope on financial reporting misbehavior. In Study 1, we investigate assumptions about the effects of sliding down the slippery slope and tone at the top on financial executives’ decisions to misreport earnings. Results of Study 1 indicate that executives are willing to engage in misreporting behavior when there is a positive tone set by the Chief Financial Officer...
Expert evaluation is the backbone of the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques. The experts make pairwise comparisons between criteria or alternatives in this evaluation. The mainstream research focus on the ambiguity in this process and use fuzzy logic. On the other hand, cognitive biases are the other but scarcely studied challenges to make accurate decisions. The purpose of this paper is to propose pilot filters – as a debiasing strategy – embedded in the MCDM techniques to reduce ...