Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-d8cs5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-29T17:32:52.076Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 25 - Training Can Improve Decision Making

from Toward Better Beliefs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2022

By
Irene Scopelliti
Edited by
Julien Musolino ,
Joseph Sommer  and
Pernille Hemmer
Julien Musolino
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
Joseph Sommer
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
Pernille Hemmer
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
Get access

Summary

Research in judgment and decision making has made a lot of progress on the front of the identification of biases, and, more recently, on their correction, by suggesting feasible interventions to reduce their prevalence. Despite initial mixed results, more recent research has revealed that training is a promising debiasing tool. One-shot training interventions can reduce the incidence of several cognitive biases up to three months post training. These effects generalize to decisions and problems that were not featured in the training but are susceptible to the same biases. They were also observed in a field setting when trainees were not able to connect the decision problems to the training. Although the complexity of the decision strategies taught and the propensity of trainees to see themselves as immune to bias may pose boundary conditions to the occurrence of these effects, training has notable advantages in comparison to other debiasing tools such as incentives, accountability, and nudges.

Keywords

decisionsdebiasingtrainingcognitive biasheuristics and biasesjudgment and decision makingfeedbackbias blind spot
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cognitive Science of Belief
A Multidisciplinary Approach
 , pp. 557 - 573
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arkes, H. R. (1981) Impediments to accurate clinical judgment and possible ways to minimize their impact. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 49(3), 323–330.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Arkes, H. R. (1991) Costs and benefits of judgment errors: implications for debiasing. Psychological Bulletin, 110(3), 486–498.Google Scholar
Arkes, H. R. & Blumer, C. (1985) The psychology of sunk cost. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 35(1), 124–140.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arkes, H. R., Faust, D., Guilmette, T. J. & Hart, K. (1988) Eliminating the hindsight bias. Journal of Applied Psychology, 73(2), 305–307.Google Scholar
Arkes, H. R., & Harkness, A. R. (1983) Estimates of contingency between two dichotomous variables. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 112(1), 117–135.Google Scholar
Barton, M., Symborski, C., Quinn, M. M., Morewedge, C. K., Kassam, K. S., & Korris, J. H. (2015) The Use of Theory in Designing a Serious Game for the Reduction of Cognitive Biases. Paper presented at the DiGRA ‘15 – Proceedings of the 2015 DiGRA International Conference.Google Scholar
Benartzi, S. & Thaler, R. (2007) Heuristics and biases in retirement savings behavior. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21(3), 81–104.Google Scholar
Bhargava, S. & Loewenstein, G. (2015) Behavioral economics and public policy 102: beyond nudging. American Economic Review, 105(5), 396–401.Google Scholar
de Bruin, W. B., Parker, A. M., & Fischhoff, B. (2007) Individual differences in adult decision-making competence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(5), 938–956.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Camerer, C. F. & Hogarth, R. M. (1999) The effects of financial incentives in experiments: a review and capital-labor-production framework. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 19(1), 7–42.Google Scholar
Chang, W., Chen, E., Mellers, B., & Tetlock, P. (2016) Developing expert political judgment: the impact of training and practice on judgmental accuracy in geopolitical forecasting tournaments. Judgment and Decision Making, 11(5), 509–526.Google Scholar
Davies, M. F. (1992) Field dependence and hindsight bias: cognitive restructuring and the generation of reasons. Journal of Research in Personality, 26(1), 58–74.Google Scholar
Downs, J. S. & Shafir, E. (1999) Why some are perceived as more confident and more insecure, more reckless and more cautious, more trusting and more suspicious, than others: enriched and impoverished options in social judgment. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 6(4), 598–610.Google Scholar
Fischhoff, B. (1977) Perceived informativeness of facts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 3(2), 349–358.Google Scholar
Fischhoff, B. (1982) Debiasing. In Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., & Tversky, A. (Eds.). Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases (pp. 422–444). Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Fong, G. T., Krantz, D. H., & Nisbett, R. E. (1986) The effects of statistical training on thinking about everyday problems. Cognitive Psychology, 18(3), 253–292.Google Scholar
Fong, G. T. & Nisbett, R. E. (1991) Immediate and delayed transfer of training effects in statistical reasoning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 120(1), 34–45.Google Scholar
Frederick, S. (2005) Cognitive reflection and decision making. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19(4), 25–42.Google Scholar
Gigerenzer, G. & Hoffrage, U. (1995) How to improve Bayesian reasoning without instruction: frequency formats, Psychological Review, 102(4), 684–704.Google Scholar
Gilovich, T., Griffin, D., & Kahneman, D. (Eds.) (2002) Heuristics and biases: the psychology of intuitive judgment. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hertwig, R. (2017) When to consider boosting: some rules for policy-makers. Behavioural Public Policy, 1(2), 143–161.Google Scholar
Hertwig, R. & Grüne-Yanoff, T. (2017) Nudging and boosting: steering or empowering good decisions. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12(6), 973–986.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hogarth, R. M. (2001). Educating intuition. The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Holmes, D. S. (1968) Dimensions of projection. Psychological Bulletin, 69(4), 248–268.Google Scholar
Johnson, E. J. & Goldstein, D. (2003) Medicine. Do defaults save lives? Science, 302(5649), 1338–1339.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jones, E. E. & Harris, V. A. (1967) The attribution of attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 3(1), 1–24.Google Scholar
Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1972) Subjective probability: a judgment of representativeness. Cognitive Psychology, 3(3), 430–454.Google Scholar
Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1979) Intuitive prediction: Biases and corrective procedures. Management Science, 12, 313–327.Google Scholar
Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1982) On the study of statistical intuitions. Cognition, 11(2), 123–141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klayman, J. & Ha, Y. W. (1987) Confirmation, disconfirmation, and information in hypothesis testing. Psychological Review, 94(2), 211–228.Google Scholar
Koriat, A., Lichtenstein, S., & Fischhoff, B. (1980) Reasons for confidence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning & Memory, 6(2), 107–118.Google Scholar
Krueger, J. & Stanke, D. (2001) The role of self-referent and other-referent knowledge in perceptions of group characteristics. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(7), 878–888.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Larrick, R. P. (2004) Debiasing, Blackwell handbook of judgment and decision making (pp. 316–337): Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Google Scholar
Larrick, R. P., Morgan, J. N., & Nisbett, R. E. (1990) Teaching the use of cost–benefit reasoning in everyday life. Psychological Science, 1(6), 362–370.Google Scholar
Larrick, R. P. & Soll, J. B. (2006) Intuitions about combining opinions: misappreciation of the averaging principle. Management Science, 52(1), 111–127.Google Scholar
Lehman, D. R., Lempert, R. O., & Nisbett, R. E. (1988) The effects of graduate training on reasoning: Formal discipline and thinking about everyday-life events. American Psychologist, 43(6), 431–442.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lehman, D. R. & Nisbett, R. E. (1990) A longitudinal study of the effects of undergraduate training on reasoning. Developmental Psychology, 26(6), 952–960.Google Scholar
Lerner, J. & Tetlock, P. (1999) Accounting for the effects of accountability. Psychological Bulletin, 125(2), 255–275.Google Scholar
Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U. K., Seifert, C. M., Schwarz, N., & Cook, J. (2012) Misinformation and its correction continued influence and successful debiasing. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13(3), 106–131.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lichtenstein, S. & Fischhoff, B. (1980) Training for calibration. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 26(2), 149–171.Google Scholar
Lilienfeld, S. O. (2008) Can psychology save the world? British Psychological Society Research Digest. http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2007/09/can-psychology-save-world.htmlGoogle Scholar
Lilienfeld, S. O., Ammirati, R., & Landfield, K. (2009) Giving debiasing away: can psychological research on correcting cognitive errors promote human welfare? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4(4), 390–398.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lord, C. G., Lepper, M. R., & Preston, E. (1984) Considering the opposite: a corrective strategy for social judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47(6), 1231–1243.Google Scholar
Milkman, K. L., Chugh, D., & Bazerman, M. H. (2009). How can decision making be improved? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4(4), 379–383.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Morewedge, C. K. & Kahneman, D. (2010) Associative processes in intuitive judgment. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(10), 435–440.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Morewedge, C. K., Yoon, H., Scopelliti, I., Symborski, C. W., Korris, J. H., & Kassam, K. S. (2015) Debiasing decisions: improved decision making with a single training intervention. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2(1), 129–140.Google Scholar
Mussweiler, T., Strack, F., & Pfeiffer, T. (2000) Overcoming the inevitable anchoring effect: considering the opposite compensates for selective accessibility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26(9), 1142–1150.Google Scholar
Nickerson, R. S. (1998) Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175–220.Google Scholar
Nisbett, R. E. (1993) Rules for reasoning. Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Nisbett, R. E., Fong, G. T., Lehman, D. R., & Cheng, P. W. (1987) Teaching reasoning. Science, 238(4827), 625–631.Google Scholar
Nisbett, R. E., Krantz, D. H., Jepson, G., & Kunda, Z. (1983) The use of statistical heuristics in everyday inductive reasoning. Psychological Review, 90(4), 339–363.Google Scholar
Northcraft, G. B. & Neale, M. A. (1987) Experts, amateurs, and real estate: an anchoring-and-adjustment perspective on property pricing decisions. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 39(1), 84–97.Google Scholar
Parker, A. M. & Fischhoff, B. (2005) Decision-making competence: external validation through an individual-differences approach. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 18(1), 1–27.Google Scholar
Payne, J. W., Bettman, J. R., & Johnson, E. J. (1993) The adaptive decision maker. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Phillips, J. K., Klein, G., & Sieck, W. R. (2004) Expertise in judgment and decision making: a case for training intuitive decision skills. In Keren, G. & Wu, G. (Eds.). Handbook of judgment and decision making (pp. 297–315). Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Pronin, E., Gilovich, T., & Ross, L. (2004) Objectivity in the eye of the beholder: divergent perceptions of bias in self versus others. Psychological Review, 111(3), 781–799.Google Scholar
Pronin, E., Lin, D., & Ross, L. (2002) The bias blind spot: perceptions of bias in self and others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(3), 369–381.Google Scholar
Ross, L. (1977) The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: distortions in the attribution process. In Berkowitz, L. (Ed.). Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 10 (pp. 173–220). Academic Press.Google Scholar
Ross, L., Amabile, T., & Steinmetz, J. (1977) Social roles, social control, and biases in social perception processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35(7), 485–494.Google Scholar
Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977) The “false consensus effect”: an egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13(3), 279–301.Google Scholar
Ross, L., Lepper, M. R., & Hubbard, M. (1975) Perseverance in self-perception and social perception: biased attributional processes in the debriefing paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(5), 880–892.Google Scholar
Scopelliti, I., Min, H. L., McCormick, E., Kassam, K. S., & Morewedge, C. K. (2018) Individual differences in correspondence bias: measurement, consequences, and correction of biased interpersonal attributions. Management Science, 64(4), 1879–1910.Google Scholar
Scopelliti, I., Morewedge, C. K., McCormick, E., Min, H. L., Lebrecht, S., & Kassam, K. S. (2015) Bias blind spot: structure, measurement, and consequences. Management Science, 61(10), 2468–2486.Google Scholar
Schneider, W. & Shiffrin, R. M. (1977) Controlled and automatic human information processing: I. Detection, search, and attention. Psychological Review, 84(1), 1–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sellier, A. L., Scopelliti, I., & Morewedge, C. K. (2019) Debiasing training improves decision making in the field. Psychological Science, 30(9), 1371–1379.Google Scholar
Shefrin, H. & Statman, M. (1985) The disposition to sell winners too early and ride losers too long: theory and evidence. The Journal of Finance, 40(3), 777–790.Google Scholar
Shiffrin, R. M. & Schneider, W. (1977) Controlled and automatic human information processing: II. perceptual learning, automatic attending, and a general theory. Psychological Review, 84(2), 127–190.Google Scholar
Sloman, S. (1996) The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 3–22.Google Scholar
Snyder, M. L. & Frankel, A. (1976) Observer bias: a stringent test of behavior engulfing the field. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34(5), 857–864.Google Scholar
Snyder, M. & Swann, W. B. (1978) Hypothesis-testing processes in social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(11), 1202–1212.Google Scholar
Soll, J. B., Milkman, K. L., & Payne, J. W. (2016) A user’s guide to debiasing. In Keren, G. & Wu, G. (Eds.). Handbook of judgment and decision making (pp. 924–951). Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Stanovich, K. E. (1999) Who is rational?: Studies of individual differences in reasoning. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.Google Scholar
Stanovich, K. E. (2011) Rationality and the reflective mind. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Stanovich, K. E. & West, R. F. (1998) Individual differences in rational thought. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 127(2), 161–188.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stone, E. R. & Opel, R. B. (2000) Training to improve calibration and discrimination: the effects of performance and environmental feedback. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 83(2), 282–309.Google Scholar
Symborski, C., Barton, M., Quinn, M. M., Korris, J. H., Kassam, K. S., & Morewedge, C. K. (2017) The design and development of serious games using iterative evaluation. Games and Culture, 12(3), 252–268.Google Scholar
Thaler, R. H. & Benartzi, S. (2004) Save more tomorrowTM: using behavioral economics to increase employee saving. Journal of Political Economy, 112(S1), S164–S187.Google Scholar
Thaler, R. H. & Sunstein, C. R. (2008) Nudge. Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Tschirgi, J. E. (1980) Sensible reasoning: a hypothesis about hypotheses. Child Development, 51(1), 1–10.Google Scholar
Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1973) Availability: a heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), 207–232.Google Scholar
Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1974) Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases. Biases in judgments reveal some heuristics of thinking under uncertainty. Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131.Google Scholar
Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1981) The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211(4481), 453–458.Google Scholar
Ward, W. C., & Jenkins, H. M. (1965) The display of information and the judgment of contingency. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 19(3), 231–241.Google Scholar
Wason, P. C. (1960) On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12(3), 129–140.Google Scholar
Wason, P. C. (1968) Reasoning about a rule. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 20(3), 273–281.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Weinstein, N. & Klein, W. (1995) Resistance of personal risk perceptions to debiasing interventions. Health Psychology, 14(2), 132–140.Google Scholar
West, R. F., Meserve, R. J., & Stanovich, K. E. (2012) Cognitive sophistication does not attenuate the bias blind spot. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(3), 506–519.Google Scholar
Wilson, T. & Brekke, N. (1994) Mental contamination and mental correction: unwanted influences on judgments and evaluations. Psychological Bulletin, 116(1), 117–142.Google Scholar
Yoon, H., Scopelliti, I., & Morewedge, C. K. (2021) Decision making can be improved through observational learning. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 162(January), 155–188.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×