The influence of cognitive bias on crisis decision-making: Experimental evidence on the comparison of bias effects between crisis decision-maker groups

A crisis requires the affected population, governments or non-profit organizations, as well as crisis experts, to make urgent and sometimes life-critical decisions. With the urgency and uncertainty they create, crises are particularly amenable to inducing cognitive biases that influence decision-making. However, there is limited empirical evidence regarding the impact of cognitive biases on estimation, judgment, and decision-making tasks in crises. Possible biases occurring in crises are: (1) to be influenced by how information is framed (i.e., framing effect), (2) to overly rely on information that confirms rather than opposes preliminary assumptions (i.e., confirmation bias), (3) to rely heavily on a skewed informational cue when making estimations (i.e., anchoring bias), and (4) to see the own decision-making as less biased than decision-making of others (i.e., bias blind spot). We investigate these four cognitive biases using three online survey experiments targeting crisis-affected people of the general public (n = 460, mTurk workers), governmental and non-profit workers (n = 50, mTurk workers), and crisis experts (n = 21, purposefully sampled). Our findings show that crisis experts are the least biased group but are still significantly affected by anchoring, framing, and bias blind spot. Crisis-affected people from the general public showed the strongest susceptibility to all four biases studied.