The Role of Contextual Factors in Repeated Judgements: Implications for Workplace Learning

My students and I continued to perform research on the effect of time pressure on decision making for a simulated team, air defense task. Without going into the details, we found the reward structure to be much more effective than interface features in maintaining high levels of decision accuracy under high levels of time pressure. The cost for maintaining accuracy was that operators made fewer decisions and sent less information. These results, combined with our previous research, suggest that, depending on the team decision making task and support environment, (1) there is a time pressure level beyond which operators can not maintain both decision accuracy and quantity, and (2) if one wants to maintain accuracy, the reward structure and not the interface, may be the more effective mechanism for doing so. (By the way, a more technically detailed and expanded version of our Brunswik book chapter should appear in Acta Psychologica later this year. In addition, we published a paper in the March/April issue of IEEE Internet Computing describing an experiment showing that an actual website with alternative comparison features led people to use significantly more compensatory than non-compensatory decision strategies, while a site without such features did the opposite.)