CHS:III:Small:Designing Visual Representations to Mitigate Potential Cognitive Biases in Complex Decision-Making Processes

人们经常评估复杂的信息来做出决策。例如，评审员评估学生申请，以做出大学录取决定。在这种情况下，人们可能会受到推理偏见的影响，这可能导致不公平或错误的决定。 图表和图形等视觉效果可用于支持此类复杂流程。它们还可以帮助消除一些可能的偏见。本研究将探讨潜在的偏见，以及如何减少其影响与视觉表征。本研究的主要目的是通过人种学研究来识别和理解整体评估过程中潜在的认知偏见，并设计相应的消除偏见的方法。这将通过三个主要研究阶段来实现。第一阶段将采用认知任务分析和社会组织分析，以了解和描述整体招生过程中所涉及的数据和任务以及潜在的认知偏见。在第二阶段，项目团队将探索视觉表征的潜力，以减轻几个候选的认知偏见。通过系统的众包研究，视觉去偏见的方法将进行评估，并将导致一套准则，将偏见缓解策略整合到可视化设计。最后，该项目的第三阶段将在实践中检验由此产生的准则。项目团队将设计和开发一个视觉分析工具，用于整合有效的视觉偏差缓解策略的整体招生过程。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估。

People often assess complex information to make decisions. For example, reviewers assess student applications to make college admissions decisions. In such cases, people can be subject to reasoning biases that may lead to unfair or poor decisions. Visuals, such as charts and graphs, can be used to support such complex processes. They can also help in countering some of the possible biases. This research will study the potential biases and how to reduce their effects with visual representations. The findings can be applied to support and improve many complex decision-making applications, including the college admissions process.The primary goal of this research project is to identify and understand the potential cognitive biases in the holistic review process through ethnographic studies and to devise corresponding debiasing approaches using visualizations. This will be achieved through three primary research phases. The first phase will employ a cognitive task analysis and socio-organizational analysis to understand and characterize the holistic admissions process in terms of the data and tasks involved as well as the potential cognitive biases. In the second phase, the project team will explore the potential of visual representations for mitigating several of the candidate cognitive biases. Through systematic crowdsourced studies, the visual debiasing approaches will be evaluated and will result in a set of guidelines for integrating bias-mitigation strategies into visualization design. Finally, the third phase of the project will test the resulting guidelines in practice. The project team will design and develop a visual analysis tool for the holistic admissions process that integrates the effective visual bias-mitigating strategies. This tool will be evaluated through a three-month deployment study.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.