Decision Biases and Heuristics Among Emergency Managers: Just Like the Public They Manage For?

Emergency Management Decision Biases for Climate and Weather Forecasts

Emergency managers who work on weather-related disasters comprise an important audience for climate forecasts. This paper examine how such emergency managers—a class of experts who routinely deal with uncertain information—interpret weather forecasts as well as longer-range forecasts of seasonal climate anomalies such as El Niño events. We rely on a national-level survey of county emergency man...

Decision Heuristics for Comparison: How Good Are They?

Simple decision heuristics are cognitive models of human and animal decision making. They examine few pieces of information and combine the pieces in simple ways, for example, by considering them sequentially or giving them equal weight. They have been studied most extensively for the problem of comparison, where the objective is to identify which of a given number of alternatives has the highe...

Heuristics and Biases: Implications for Security

How can heuristics and biases improve the design of security technologies to leverage end-user behaviors? This position paper argues both for the importance of this question, and the specific identified examples. We discuss the limitations and criticisms of a heuristics and biases approach to understanding human behavior. We introduce some emerging theories in social-psychology that are more qu...

Heuristics: Heuristics and Biases at the Bargaining Table

Heuristics and Biases in Charity

We consider utilitarian models of altruism constrained by limited willingness to sacrifice self-interest. By these models donors should strive to maximize the good they do, within the constraint. We describe several departures from predictions of these models and provide new data on some of them, based on studies conducted on the World Wide Web. We find: people focus on minimizing operating cos...