Empirical Evaluation of a Decision-Analytic Aid

Abstract

Many studies have demonstrated that the use of decision analysis encourages people to choose alternatives which maximize subjective expected utility and are, therefore, more internally consistent than decisions arrived at intuitively. However, few experiments have investigated whether subjects using a decision-analytic aid produce “better” or more correct decisions in light of the ultimate outcome of these decisions. To help fill this research gap, an experiment was performed to compare the degree of success experienced by aided and unaided subjects in attaining correct decisions.

Human Cognition and Information Display in C3I System Tasks.

“…In view of the well established generalization that humans are limited in their ability to process information and to make certain kinds of judgments and/or decisions based on it (Payne, 1982;Sage, 1981), much attention has been given to design issues such as man-machine function allocation (Meister, 1985;Meister & Sullivan, 1979;Williges, Ehrich, Williges, Hartson, & Greenstein, 1984), decision aiding (Christen, 1980;Fischoff & Bar-Hillel, 1980), and adaptive computer aiding (Morris, Rouse, & Frey, 1984;Rouse & Rouse, 1983; Samet, Weltman, & Davis, 1976). In other words, it is recognized that the growing demands of modern warfare strain and often exceed human cognitive capabilities, and the issue becomes how and where to provide machine assistance.…”