Decision Making in an Emergency: When Information is not Enough

Abstract

An emergency, whether in a nuclear power plant, a stock brokerage house, or a battlefield, requires rapid and appropriate decision making. Making a decision under the stress and confusion of a rapidly changing environment requires the availability of information. Before an emergency, sophisticated systems ensure that decision makers have as much information as possible. After an emergency, these same decision makers often complain that they did not have the information they needed to make good decisions. Analysis of simulated and actual emergencies suggests that adequate information is frequently available to the decision maker. The perception of a need for more and better information must be based on something other than the information itself. Our analysis of several such systems suggest that the inherent characteristics of modern, sophisticated information and communications systems may degrade decision making effectiveness during an emergency in three ways: (1) through decreasing the confidence decision makers have in the accuracy of information provided; (2) through self-reinforcement of information in “looped” systems; and (3) through artificially biasing the information provided the decision maker. This report presents the results of a study and link analyses of decisions made during simulated emergencies involving complex systems. The implications of our findings for the design of emergency management systems will be discussed in the following presentation/paper.