Decision making dyads and judgement overconfidence: Implications for high-risk industries.

In the workplace, overconfidence is generally considered undesirable as it may increase people's propensity to take risks. In many areas (e.g., aviation, shipping, nuclear control, and driving), risk-taking is detrimental to safety. We hypothesised that decision-makers would be overconfident and, due to group polarisation, decision-making pairs would be more overconfident than single decision-makers. As was predicted, when answering a 24-item general knowledge questionnaire (d = 0.94) and a task exploring how they might reorient themselves if lost (d = 1.93), participants (N = 63) were overconfident about their performance; importantly, participants in pairs (n = 32) were more overconfident on general knowledge (Hedges' g = 0.51) and lost procedures (Hedges' g = 0.52), than were participants who completed the tasks alone (n = 31). The findings imply that in some situations, single decision-makers may exhibit less overconfidence. The safety implications for a number of areas are discussed.

Debiasing visual pilots' weather-related decision making.

Pilots who decide to continue a flight into deteriorating weather conditions, rather than turn back or divert, are a significant cause of fatal crashes in general aviation. Earlier research has suggested that cognitive biases such as the anchoring effect and confirmation bias are implicated in many decisions to continue into worsening weather. In this study, we explored whether a simple debiasing technique, 'considering the alternative', reduced the effect of these two potentially fatal biases. Despite the study being adequately powered, our attempts to reduce the effects of biases were both unsuccessful. Negative findings such as these are particularly useful in aviation, as they can provide information on what does not work in this high stakes industry, even though such strategies may work elsewhere.