Countering Positive Confirmation Biases in Command Teams: An Experiment with Different Interventions
Abstract
As part of the larger sense making effort in the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), the Singapore Armed Forces Centre for Military Experimentation (SCME) continuously strives to challenge our C2 status quo. This has generated a number of C2 ideas that are currently undergoing experimentation within SCME. One such idea is the Command Post Anywhere (CPA) concept which experiments with the idea of a highly survivable future command post capable of full distributed collaboration in a networked environment. In the middle of last year, SCME went further and posed herself the question of whether other useful concepts could be built on top the fundamental idea of distributed collaboration. This led to a research in psychological/technological and social concepts such as groupware awareness, group think, insight/creativity and decision making biases. Decision making biases, in particular positive confirmation bias, would eventually become the focus of the experiment conducted in October 2004. For the military, there could be dire consequences as a result of positive confirmation bias. It could leniently mean a need to re-plan or the catastrophic loss of units at the other extreme. In this paper, the question of how positive confirmation bias could be addressed and mitigated in a command team setting with different C2 interventions was investigated.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 2005
- Accession Number
- ADA463985
Entities
People
- Chien-wei Chia