Teaching Decision Making With Serious Games

Abstract

Game-based training may have different characteristics than other forms of instruction. The independent validation of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) Sirius program evaluated game-based cognitive bias training across several games with a common set of control groups. Control groups included a professionally produced video that taught the same cognitive biases and an unrelated video that did not teach any biases. Knowledge was tested immediately after training and after a delay. This article presents the results from the two phases of the Sirius program. Gamebased training showed advantages in teaching bias mitigation skills (procedural knowledge) but had no advantage over video instruction in teaching people to answer explicit questions about biases (declarative knowledge). Overall, training effects persisted over time, and games performed as well as and in some cases better than the video-based instruction for knowledge retention. Our results suggest that serious games can be an effective training tool, particularly for teaching procedural knowledge.

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

“…[49] is the only article that both Regarding retention, there still are a few positive findings for several biases. Effects were observed up to 12 weeks after the interventions, with relatively large effect sizes [45][46][47]. The largest effect sizes were found by Clegg e.a.…”

“…Framing effect "the tendency of people to decide differently when the same information is worded differently" [6,32] Insensitivity to sample size "people's tendency to disregard the fact that small samples don't follow the laws of big samples" [1] Outcome bias "the tendency of people to evaluate quality of decisions based on their outcome" [22] Overconfidence bias "the tendency of people to perceive their ability as better than it actually is" [49] Projection bias "assuming others' emotions, thoughts, and values are similar to one's own" [57,58] Regression to the mean "the tendency of people not to take into account that after an extreme value the next value will more probably be closer to the mean" [59] Representativeness bias "using the similarity of an outcome to a prototypical outcome to judge its probability" [60] Sunk cost fallacy "people's tendency to continue an activity if they have already invested money, time or effort in it" [24,61] The second article on retention by Rhodes e.a. [46] discusses two experiments in which the investigated biases (anchoring bias, projection bias, representativeness bias, bias blind spot, and the confirmation bias), were analyzed as a sum score instead of individually. Since the biases are so diverse in nature, one could question whether the use of a sum score is valid.…”

“…This was the only study using repetitive training, which is known to increase retention [62]. Most interventions with successful results involved serious games [45][46][47][48]. These studies all targeted a group of six biases that are relevant for military intelligence analysis [47,63].…”

“…The games used in these yielded valuable information on retention, but no information on transfer. Most studies found that games mitigated biases more than videos that educate about biases sizes [45][46][47]. The authors of these studies often suggest that the interactive nature of the games might be essential.…”

Design and Implementation of Shologuti: A Rural Game of Bangladesh

“…Nergiz et.al [13] & Strzalkowski et.al [15] described the experiences from the implementation of a computer game development that it could help a student to improve in problem solving, the application of previously learned knowledge, the utilization of independent learning and learning by doing. Rhodes et.al [14] described that serious games can be an efficient training engine, particularly for teaching procedural knowledge.…”