The effectiveness of feedback messages in a situated electronic work environment

Research during the past several decades concerning information acquisition tasks has explored how cognitive bias induced decisions affect professional judgment. Psychologists have been studying the effects of bias or errors in decision making for several decades. But the use of their results is difficult because the literature is too high level for computer implementation. Errors tend to overlap. Many levels of errors have been identified, and researchers are in the process of further studying them. This study, however, not only identifies errors, it also implements critic engineering techniques to correct them. Therefore, this study implements two types of feedback strategies (the cognitive strategy and the classical strategy) and identifies their effectiveness in a situated, electronic work environment. Such computer software are necessary to aid a decision maker in a real time learning and work environment. The empirical study also identifies which type of feedback strategy is most helpful to the users in learning of the problems and most importantly, providing appropriate solutions. This study identifies the relationships between the influencer strategy (feedback before committing the errors) with that of the debiaser strategy (feedback after committing the errors). Implementation of such strategies may be fruitful to increase human judgment in making decisions in many real world situations.