Coglunch - March 9, 2002

"Collaborative Cognition and Cognitive Bias: CACHE Support for Debiasing Judgment"
Dorrit Billman
PARC Collaborative work seems both necessary and beneficial for solving complex cognitive tasks. Yet collaboration is fraught with peril. For example, a group of similar individuals working together may increase effects of confirmation bias. I will comment on ways collaborative cognition situations vary, place the task we investigated into this context, and then consider how technology can support collaboration. CACHE is a system which supports collaborative analysis of evidence in relation to hypotheses. We ran a study of collaboration and cognitive bias with participants using CACHE. We compared problem solving behavior and outcomes across differently organized groups: homogeneous groups, heterogeneous groups, and individuals working alone. I will present our findings, what they suggest about collaborative analysis, and their implications for further development of CACHE.

Work at PARC in collaboration with Gregorio Convertino, Jeff Shrager, JP Massur, & Peter Pirolli.

Last modified: Thu Mar 9 12:07:56 PST 2006 by emma@csli.stanford.edu