The games target six well-known cognitive biases. Participants who played one of our games, each of which took about 60 minutes to complete, showed a large immediate reduction in their commission of the biases (by more than 31%), and showed a large reduction (by more than 23%) at least two months later. But, as we report in a paper just published in Policy Insights in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, the interactive games not only reduced game players’ susceptibility to biases immediately, those reductions persisted for several weeks. There was scant evidence that this kind of one-shot training intervention could be effective, and we thought our chances of success were slim. Korris and Karim Kassam, a former assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University.) So we spent the past four years developing two interactive, “serious” computer games to see if they might substantially reduce game players’ susceptibility to cognitive bias. Symborski, Creative Technologies, Inc.’s James H. (The team included Boston University’s Haewon Yoon, City University London’s Irene Scopelliti, Leidos’ Carl W. My research collaborators and I wondered if an interactive training exercise might effectively debias decision-makers. However, these methods are often not always effective, and when effective, only affect specific decisions, not decision-makers’ ability to make less biased decisions in other situations. The second approach involves changing the way information for various choices is presented or choices are made, such as adding calorie information to fast-food menus or offering salad as the default side order to entrées instead of French fries. Taxing soda, for example, in the hopes that the increased cost will dissuade people from buying it. The first is changing the incentives that influence a decision. Weather forecasters, for instance, are highly accurate when predicting the chance of rain, but they are just as likely as untrained novices to show bias when making other kinds of probability estimates, such as estimating how many of their answers to basic trivia questions are correct.īecause training designed to improve general decision making abilities has not previously been effective, most efforts to debias people have focused on two techniques.
But even experts in such areas fail to apply what they’ve learned to new areas. Traditional training, designed to debias and improve decision-making, is effective in specific domains such as firefighting, chess, or weather forecasting. Researchers have also long searched for ways to train people to reduce bias and improve their general decision making ability – with little success. From misguided beliefs about the side effects of vaccinating our children, to failures in analysis by our intelligence community, biases in decision making contribute to problems in business, public policy, medicine, law, education, and private life. We all know the havoc that biased decisions can wreak.
Researchers in recent years have exhaustively catalogued and chronicled the biases that affect our decisions.