What have we learned? Insights from a decade of bias research

Abstract

Cognitive biases—unconscious errors resulting from how people’s minds work—have been observed in both laboratory and in situ examinations of petroleum personnel’s decisions, and have been demonstrated to result in significant lost value. Since 2003, the CIBP group at the Australian School of Petroleum has been conducting research into such effects, including the use of a battery of questions designed to test oil and gas personnel’s susceptibility to said biases. This paper tracks industry performance on biases across the last decade, noting changes relative to baseline results from Welsh et al (2005) and on insights since gained into the nature and operation of cognitive biases more generally. Results are discussed in light of standard findings regarding the strength of biases observed in the wider psychological literature and in direct comparison with results observed in a sample of petroleum students collected from 2005–15, providing valuable benchmarks. The central observation is that bias strength has remained stable across the period in question, according with earlier studies suggesting biases are robust and increased awareness of their existence is insufficient to reduce bias susceptibility. Given this observation, the authors look in finer detail at what can be done, discussing the benefits ongoing training regarding the nature of biases can provide, before describing debiasing techniques and changes to the elicitation methods and tools known to reduce bias, based on state-of-the-art understanding of when and how biases occur. This, the authors argue, offers significant opportunities to reduce bias and improve industry decisions and economic outcomes.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.