Retention and Transfer of Cognitive Bias Mitigation Interventions: A Systematic Literature Study

Cognitive biases can adversely affect human judgment and decision making and should therefore preferably be mitigated, so that we can achieve our goals as effectively as possible. Hence, numerous bias mitigation interventions have been developed and evaluated. However, to be effective in practical situations beyond laboratory conditions, the bias mitigation effects of these interventions should be retained over time and should transfer across contexts. This systematic review provides an overview of the literature on retention and transfer of bias mitigation interventions. A systematic search yielded 52 studies that were eligible for screening. At the end of the selection process, only 12 peer-reviewed studies remained that adequately studied retention over a period of at least 14 days (all 12 studies) or transfer to different tasks and contexts (one study). Eleven of the relevant studies investigated the effects of bias mitigation training using game- or video-based interventions. These 11 studies showed considerable overlap regarding the biases studied, kinds of interventions, and decision-making domains. Most of them indicated that gaming interventions were effective after the retention interval and that games were more effective than video interventions. The study that investigated transfer of bias mitigation training (next to retention) found indications of transfer across contexts. To be effective in practical circumstances, achieved effects of cognitive training should lead to enduring changes in the decision maker’s behavior and should generalize towards other task domains or training contexts. Given the small number of overlapping studies, our main conclusion is that there is currently insufficient evidence that bias mitigation interventions will substantially help people to make better decisions in real life conditions. This is in line with recent theoretical insights about the ‘hard-wired’ neural and evolutionary origin of cognitive biases

A neural network framework for cognitive bias

Human decision making shows systematic simplifications and deviations from the tenets of rationality (‘heuristics’) that may lead to suboptimal decisional outcomes (‘cognitive biases’). There are currently three prevailing theoretical perspectives on the origin of heuristics and cognitive biases: a cognitive-psychological, an ecological and an evolutionary perspective. However, these perspectives are mainly descriptive and none of them provides an overall explanatory framework for the underlying mechanisms of cognitive biases. To enhance our understanding of cognitive heuristics and biases we propose a neural network framework for cognitive biases, which explains why our brain systematically tends to default to heuristic (‘Type 1’) decision making. We argue that many cognitive biases arise from intrinsic brain mechanisms that are fundamental for the working of biological neural networks. In order to substantiate our viewpoint, we discern and explain four basic neural network principles: (1) Association, (2) Compatibility (3) Retainment, and (4) Focus. These principles are inherent to (all) neural networks which were originally optimized to perform concrete biological, perceptual, and motor functions. They form the basis for our inclinations to associate and combine (unrelated) information, to prioritize information that is compatible with our present state (such as knowledge, opinions and expectations), to retain given information that sometimes could better be ignored, and to focus on dominant information while ignoring relevant information that is not directly activated. The supposed mechanisms are complementary and not mutually exclusive. For different cognitive biases they may all contribute in varying degrees to distortion of information. The present viewpoint not only complements the earlier three viewpoints, but also provides a unifying and binding framework for many cognitive bias phenomena