Measuring Human Capabilities An Agenda for Basic Research on the Assessment of Individual and Group Performance Potential for Military Accession (2015) / Chapter Skim
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3 Cognitive Biases
3 Cognitive Biases
Pages 53-64
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From page 53... ...
The conceptual relevance of this topic, paired with the limited research to date, which takes an individual-differences orientation, leads the committee to conclude that cognitive biases merit inclusion in a program of basic research with the long-term goal of improving the Army's enlisted accession system. Decision biases or cognitive biases refer to ways of thinking or a thought process that produces errors in judgment or decision making, or at least departures from the use of normative rules or standards (Gilovich and Griffin, 2002)
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From page 54... ...
, cognitive biases may influence the quality of the decisions and their outcomes. Disasters and Tragedies Many reports of major disasters invoke cognitive biases as at least partly responsible for errors in judgment that may have led to the disaster.
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From page 55... ...
contributed to confirmatory thinking such that the evidence of a military aircraft was overweighted compared to the disconfirmatory evidence of a civilian aircraft. Confirmation biases negatively affect decisions when individuals interpret information, including conflicting evidence, as confirmation of previously held beliefs.
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From page 56... ...
Salient issues include whether susceptibility to cognitive biases can be mitigated, such as through training and processes, like the structured analytic techniques employed by intelligence analysts (Heuer and Pherson, 2011) , and the degree to which susceptibility is related to other human performance factors such as cognitive ability, working memory, executive functioning, and personality (see Chapter 2 for discussion of some of these factors)
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From page 57... ...
investigated performance on tasks representing 28 cognitive biases (some based on prior literature and some first identified for the study) and found that for roughly half the tasks, there was no correlation with general cognitive ability.
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, the tendency toward them and their correlation with cognitive ability is important to understand in relation to performance. An Individual-Differences Framework for Cognitive Biases Oreg and Bayazi (2009)
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With respect to both trait and state cognitive bias factors, it seems reasonable that in an individual-differences framework their relationship could be fruitfully explored with potentially more powerful explanatory variables from an information processing perspective such as working memory, executive attention, and inhibitory control. These information-processing variables have been long known to correlate with general cognitive ability (e.g., Engle, 2002; Kyllonen and Christal, 1998)
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First, the fact that bias mitigation strategies are being investigated in the Intelligence Community indicates the importance that community assigns to cognitive biases in judgment and decision making and to their broader significance and importance in intelligence analysis. Second, the identification of six specific cognitive biases suggests that these biases might be particularly important for intelligence analysts, a career field for civilian employees of the Intelligence Community as well as a military occupational specialty, and they may therefore warrant special attention in a program of research.
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From page 61... ...
Through such work, a more systematic taxonomy might lead, for instance, to a broader theoretical framework that enables predictions of an individual's susceptibility to biases, based on both individual and situational characteristics. It may also help answer questions about how cognitive biases are related.
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From page 62... ...
RESEARCH RECOMMENDATION The U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sci ences should support research to understand cognitive biases and heu ristics, including but not limited to the following topics: A. Research should be conducted to ascertain whether various cogni tive biases and heuristics are accounted for by common bias suscep tibility factors or whether various biases reflect distinct constructs (e.g., confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error)
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. Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis.
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. Investigation Report: Formal Investigation into the Circumstances Surrounding the Downing of Iran Air Flight 655 on 3 July 1988.
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