ABSTRACT

While human-centered system design has actively sought to reduce cognitive biases in decision-making, a gap exists on the distinct role of media features in decision-support systems (DSS). Intuitively, we may presume that DSS interactivity and revisability remedy such biases. Yet, experiments reported herein reveal that combining the two features may conversely aggravate such bias. These features have been studied as distinct factors moderating bias in decision-criteria rating tasks in two experiments (sample sizes: n₁=96 for first; for second with criteria vividness controlled, n₂=429). Such study emanates from a novel view of DSS as persuasive communication media. Thus, a unique adaptation of Media Synchronicity Theory to a computer–human communication context ensues. This promotes the isolated study of interactivity and revisability, alongside their interaction. Hence, the study finds statistically significant bias reductions for revisability treatments without interactive feedback. Such real-time automatic feedback, surprisingly, makes no impact in the majority of cases. Vividness controlled, it is still revisability-only cases indicating any reduction in possible order effects bias (despite extra effort required). Thus, a fresh case is made to evaluate interactivity and revisability separately in DSS media, with empirical evidence that – together – they could be ‘doing more harm than good’.

摘要

尽管以人为中心的系统设计一直在积极寻求减少决策中的认知偏差，但媒体特征在决策支持系统 (DSS) 中的独特作用仍存在差距。直觉上，我们可以假设 DSS 交互性和可修改性纠正了这种偏见。然而，本文报道的实验表明，将这两个特征结合起来可能会反过来加剧这种偏见。在两个实验中，这些特征已被研究为缓解决策标准评分任务中的偏差的不同因素（样本大小：第一个n ₁ = 96；第二个，标准生动性受控，n ₂ =429）。这样的研究源于将 DSS 作为有说服力的传播媒体的新观点。因此，媒体同步理论对计算机 - 人类通信环境的独特适应随之而来。这促进了对交互性和可修改性以及它们的相互作用的孤立研究。因此，该研究发现，可修正性处理在统计上显着减少了偏差，而无需互动反馈。令人惊讶的是，这种实时自动反馈在大多数情况下都没有影响。生动性受到控制，它仍然是仅可修改的情况，表明可能的顺序效应偏差有任何减少（尽管需要额外的努力）。因此，提出了一个新案例来分别评估 DSS 媒体中的交互性和可修改性，经验证据表明，它们可能“弊大于利”。