Cognitive biases and time stress in team decision making

This experiment investigates the impact of time stress on the decision making performance of command and control teams. Two-person teams were trained to execute a set of simple decision procedures. Some of these procedures required subjects to make judgments that were inconsistent with normal heuristic decision processing. The principal hypothesis was that these decision procedures would be vulnerable-to-bias, and would therefore be more vulnerable to the effects of time stress than other decision procedures, The results support this hypothesis. In addition, the results suggest that the subjects adapted inappropriately to time stress. As time stress increased, they began to use a decision processing strategy that was less effective than the strategy they were trained to use.