Cognitive Design

             [Image Source:  Sharpbrains] 

Having computers help us make decisions is a growing trend in both professional and consumer life.  Computers help us make decisions by providing access to information,  analyzing and displaying information, making recommendations,  critiquing human decisions and in some cases making the full decision automatically. The question is – do we make better decisions with or without computers? Do computers make good decision assistants?

The answer depends on if the  software has been designed to work in a naturalistic fashion (i.e. is designed for how our minds actually work). Or so argues, John Maule a professor of human decision making in a keynote speech at the 9th International Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making.

In his speech professor Maule points out that computers help us in many ways by overcoming our limitations for storing and processing information but warns:

 “…because many computer systems have been developed without a full understanding of how people actually think, computers can lead people to make bad decisions”

He points out that few systems allow us to balance intuitive and analytical approaches, help us avoid the confirmation bias and provide functional support for recognition-primed decision making versus a logical-rational approach.  All great clues for how to design people-machine systems that are optimized decision-makers!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 2:33 pm and is filed under Augmented Cognition, Cognitive Bias. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.