Friends of the Behavioral Economics Club, this week we present the paper “The impact of technology on the human decision-making process” by Darioshi, R. and Lahav, E. (2021) in which authors wonder what are the factors that cause biases in the decision-making process due to the use of technologies.
We can’t imagine our day without technology, that is a reality. Our smartphone, laptop or tablet go with us everywhere. And their use influences us more than we think, even to make decisions.
Many companies around the world want to create technologies that will help people to make more informed decisions, for instance, artificial intelligence or virtual reality.
And although technologies may positively influence decision-making, sometimes they breach ethical limits. In fact, there are lots of organizations throughout the world that have already warned about the effects of social networks, to the point, for instance, of biasing elections.
For this reason, authors wonder how technology can benefit or jeopardize the human decision-making process.
Technology is in all phases of the decision-making process. For example, at the data collection stage, due to people using platforms as Google or Wikipedia, or other sources, and this information influences the decision maker in the following decision steps.
Technology helps people filter, analyze, and process information as well as formulate alternatives and evaluate them, whether consciously or unconsciously.
In fact, a mentioned study in this paper, showed that the way products and their prices are displayed on a website can induce people to buy them. Any information, even covert, affects que subconscious.
So, how does technology affect our decision-making process? What biases appear with the use of technology?
For instance, technologies make possible that everybody has access to an infinite amount of information, but we do not know it that information is true and reliable.
On the other hand, frequent exposure to information can also affect a person’s decision making. The researchers assumed that frequent exposure to information could make people believe in the information. The more frequent the exposure, the more likely it is that a person will be inclined to believe that the information is more evidence based or more reliable.
Simply because when it comes about making a decision, these data are more dominant or accessible in the memory.
Another interesting fact is the so called “digital amnesia”. Is the tendency for people to forget information they can find quickly by using online search engines. A side effect of this phenomenon is that people might believe they are smarter than they really are, since they think information is easily accessible to them.
Moreover, technology can affect to our emotions and generate positive or negative sensations. There are emotions that technologies cannot properly convey. For instance, they were found to suppress a person’s empathy, and this is very negative, since empathy helps people make better decisions for society.
We also know that when emotions participate in the decision-making progress, neutrality can be lost in the process. That is why authors mention the need of not letting technology suppress or manipulate people’s emotions.
Knowing some of the biases that can appear when, consciously or unconsciously we use technology for decision-making, authors propose a model that can assist people in the analysis of specific technologies: whether they can benefit human decision making and bring people closer to the desired normative and rational solution or damage the decision-making process by potentially causing many biases.
The model assumes that awareness of possible decision-making biases contributes greatly to their prevention and can therefore bring the decision maker closer to optimal choice.
There are 7 questions in the model, all of them related to the biases explained in the paper.
Some of the questions are: What is the extent of technology’s involvement in the decision-making process? What is the amount of information, and is it realiable and relevant? What is the extent of emotional manipulation?
Authors want us to be aware that, although technologies can help a person make more intelligent and informed decisions, they also expose a person to many decision-making biases.
A limitation of this study is that this model was examined only theoretically and, therefore, should be tested experimentally under laboratory conditions to see if it really helps people.
Life is full of moments in which we should make decisions. Some will determine wo will live and who will die, some affect one’s financial condition, and some lack influence. But, before each decision is made people should be aware not only of the decision at hand, but also of the environments and technologies that influence it.
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