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Designing Information for Remediating Cognitive Biases in Decision-Making

Published: 18 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Software is playing an increasingly important role in supporting human decision-making. Previous HCI research on decision support systems (DSS) has improved the information visualization aspect of DSS information design, but has somewhat overlooked the cognitive aspect of decision-making, namely that human reasoning is heuristic and reflects systematic errors or cognitive biases. We report on an empirical study of two cognitive biases: conservatism and loss aversion. Two remediation techniques recommended by previous research were tested: the expected return method, an actuarial-inspired approach presenting objective metrics; and bootstrapping, a technique successful in improving judgment consistency. The results show that the two biases can occur simultaneously and can have a huge impact on decision-making. The results also show that the two debiasing techniques are only partly effective. These findings suggest a need for more research on debiasing, and indicate some directions for exploring debiasing techniques and building decision support systems.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2015
    4290 pages
    ISBN:9781450331456
    DOI:10.1145/2702123
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 18 April 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. cognitive bias
    2. conservatism
    3. decision making
    4. decision support system
    5. intelligent assistance
    6. loss aversion
    7. multiple-cue probability learning

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    CHI '15: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 18 - 23, 2015
    Seoul, Republic of Korea

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    CHI '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 486 of 2,120 submissions, 23%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2025)Seeing Is Believing: The Role of Scatterplots in Recommender System Trust and Decision-MakingAdvances in Visual Computing10.1007/978-3-031-77392-1_32(425-438)Online publication date: 22-Jan-2025
    • (2024)Debiasing Judgements Using a Distributed Cognition Approach: A Scoping Review of Technological StrategiesHuman Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society10.1177/00187208241292897Online publication date: 26-Oct-2024
    • (2024)Decoupling Judgment and Decision Making: A Tale of Two TailsIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2023.334664030:10(6928-6940)Online publication date: Oct-2024
    • (2024)From Information to Choice: A Critical Inquiry Into Visualization Tools for Decision MakingIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2023.332659330:1(359-369)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2024
    • (2024)Reviewing linkages between display design and cognitive biases in decision making: an emergency response perspectiveTheoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science10.1080/1463922X.2024.233768125:6(776-803)Online publication date: 10-Apr-2024
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    • (2023)“Finding the Magic Sauce”: Exploring Perspectives of Recruiters and Job Seekers on Recruitment Bias and Automated ToolsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581548(1-16)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2023)“If I Had All the Time in the World”: Ophthalmologists’ Perceptions of Anchoring Bias Mitigation in Clinical AI SupportProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581513(1-14)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2023)Exploring the role of conscientiousness on visualization-supported decision-makingComputers & Graphics10.1016/j.cag.2023.01.010111(47-62)Online publication date: Apr-2023
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