Effects of Information Availability on Command-and-Control Decision Making: Performance, Trust, and Situation Awareness

OBJECTIVE We investigated how increases in task-relevant information affect human decision-making performance, situation awareness (SA), and trust in a simulated command-and-control (C2) environment. BACKGROUND Increased information is often associated with an improvement of SA and decision-making performance in networked organizations. However, previous research suggests that increasing information without considering the task relevance and the presentation can impair performance. METHOD We used a simulated C2 task across two experiments. Experiment 1 varied the information volume provided to individual participants and measured the speed and accuracy of decision making for task performance. Experiment 2 varied information volume and information reliability provided to two participants acting in different roles and assessed decision-making performance, SA, and trust between the paired participants. RESULTS In both experiments, increased task-relevant information volume did not improve task performance. In Experiment 2, increased task-relevant information volume reduced self-reported SA and trust, and incorrect source reliability information led to poorer task performance and SA. CONCLUSION These results indicate that increasing the volume of information, even when it is accurate and task relevant, is not necessarily beneficial to decision-making performance. Moreover, it may even be detrimental to SA and trust among team members. APPLICATION Given the high volume of available and shared information and the safety-critical and time-sensitive nature of many decisions, these results have implications for training and system design in C2 domains. To avoid decrements to SA, interpersonal trust, and decision-making performance, information presentation within C2 systems must reflect human cognitive processing limits and capabilities.