City Research Online

Abstract

State risk forecasts are crucial for allocating resources to address international and domestic threats such as war, pandemics, and climate change. These risk forecasts largely rely on human judgment, which is often susceptible to cognitive biases. We conducted an experiment involving the majority of national risk analysts in a European country and a matched sample of masters students to compare their susceptibility to confirmation bias and bias blind spot in judgments related and unrelated to national risk. Additionally, we evaluated the effectiveness of a one-shot debiasing training intervention across both samples. We find that analysts exhibit less confirmation bias than students within and outside risk-related judgements. Crucially, a one-shot debiasing training session reduced confirmation bias in both analyst and student groups. These findings suggest that cost-effective debiasing interventions can improve expert judgment in national risk forecasting and provide evidence that experience and expertise reduce cognitive bias more broadly than previously recognized.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Publisher Keywords:	Human behaviour, Psychology
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management
Departments:	Bayes Business School Bayes Business School > Faculty of Management
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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