Mitigating Bias and Improving Professional Decision-Making through Persuasive Training Games

Abstract

Making accurate, unbiased decisions is critical in high-stakes professions such as law enforcement, intelligence analysis, and medicine, since the decisions can have severe consequences. In this chapter, we discuss what makes persuasive games effective for training professionals to recognize their cognitive biases, improve their knowledge about decision-making biases, and learn ways of mitigating bias. We describe our experience designing three games for professional training in cognitive biases and deception detection. This chapter focuses on the combination of decisionmaking, education, and game theories that drives our design. This is then followed by a discussion of our experiments and measurements for testing the effectiveness of our designs.