Abstract
This study examined biases, sources of difficulty and display support in strategic planning. Eight subjects performed a strategic planning “rescue” video game, which required them to make a series of choices regarding which node to “fly to” in order to rescue simulated casualties. After making each choice, subjects needed to fly a challenging tracking dynamics along a path to reach the next “node” in the decision space where the casualties were “rescued.” The dynamics along each path could be at one of four levels of difficulty. The difficulty determined the probability that the corridor would be flown successfully and therefore casualties rescued at the other end. To maximize their score, subjects had to consider the number of casualties at each node, the length of the path to the node (the shorter the better), and the probability they would fly the path successfully (an estimate of their own performance based on past experience). Periodically subjects were asked to give explicit estimates of those probabilities, such data provided in order for us to evaluate the calibration of estimated with true probability of success. Half the flights were flown with restricted preview of only the two nodes of the immediate choice. The other half offered full preview of the whole map.
The results revealed that (a) subjects' decisions were less optimal when full preview was offered, (b) this deficiency appeared to result because full preview led subjects to rely too much on the simple strategy of choosing routes with most casualties, and neglecting the use of more abstract probability values in guiding their choices, (c) subjects appeared to be well calibrated in their confidence of traversing paths correctly
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