Humanitarian crises, such as the 2014 West Africa Ebola epidemic, challenge information management and thereby threaten the digital resilience of the responding organizations. Crisis information management (CIM) is characterised by the urgency to respond despite the uncertainty of the situation. Coupled with high stakes, limited resources and a high cognitive load, crises are prone to induce biases in the data and the cognitive processes of analysts and decision-makers. When biases remain undetected and untreated in CIM, they may lead to decisions based on biased information, increasing the risk of an inefficient response. Literature suggests that crisis response needs to address the initial uncertainty and possible biases by adapting to new and better information as it becomes available. However, we know little about whether adaptive approaches mitigate the interplay of data and cognitive biases. We investigated this question in an exploratory, three-stage experiment on epidemic response. Our participants were experienced practitioners in the fields of crisis decision-making and information analysis. We found that analysts fail to successfully debias data, even when biases are detected, and that this failure can be attributed to undervaluing debiasing efforts in favor of rapid results. This failure leads to the development of biased information products that are conveyed to decision-makers, who consequently make decisions based on biased information. Confirmation bias reinforces the reliance on conclusions reached with biased data, leading to a vicious cycle, in which biased assumptions remain uncorrected. We suggest mindful debiasing as a possible counter-strategy against these bias effects in CIM.

With ongoing research, increased information sharing and knowledge exchange, humanitarian organizations have an increasing amount of evidence at their disposal to support their decisions. Nevertheless, effectively building decisions on the increasing amount of insights and information remains challenging. At the individual, organizational, and environmental levels, various factors influence the use of evidence in the decisionmaking process. This research examined these factors and specifically their influence in a case-study on humanitarian organizations and their WASH interventions in Uganda.Interviewees reported several factors that impede the implementation of evidence-based decision making. Revealing that, despite advancements in the past years, evidence-based information itself is relatively small, contradictory, and nonrepeatable. Moreover, the information is often not connected or in a format that can be acted upon. Most importantly, however, are the human aspects and organizational settings that limit access to and use of supporting data, information, and evidence. This research shows the importance of considering these factors, in addition to invest in creating knowledge and technologies to support evidence-based decision-making.

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