Reviewing linkages between display design and cognitive biases in decision making: an emergency response perspective

Abstract

Decision making in nuclear emergency response involves significant uncertainty, time pressure, and high stakes. The stress and ambiguity can result in the use of heuristic decision making strategies, which may sometimes result in poor decision outcomes. As complex information systems are often used in emergency operations, this research aims at examining linkages between design choices in computer displays and cognitive biases. This paper reports a literature review covering a set of themes that include framing effects, facilitating balanced perspectives of information, automation transparency, and the role of meta-information in conveying significance. The review provides evidence from the literature showing the importance of display design in mitigating the emergence of cognitive biases in decision making tasks. The review resulted in 11 guidelines for the design of computer displays in safety-critical applications, and directions are provided for future research. A theme that connects many of these guidelines is that providing the big picture can mitigate many types of biases, which often should encompass self-reflection and calibration of appropriate confidence levels. It can be concluded that over time, the potential for biasing users can be interwoven within computer displays if debiasing is not taken into consideration early in the design process.

Keywords:

• Decision making
• cognitive bias
• emergency management
• displays

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the reviewers at the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories for their input in this paper. The authors also appreciate the feedback from the reviewers of this journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work has been funded by the Federal Nuclear Science & Technology (FNST) Program.