BIASES INFLUENCE ON MILITARY DECISION MAKING
BIASES INFLUENCE ON MILITARY DECISION MAKING

Summary/Abstract: Humans often employ cognitive heuristic principles when making decisions. These cognitive heuristic principles allow the human to simplify the decision making task, and can, by their very nature, lead to deviations, referred to as cognitive biases, which influence the quality of the decisions. This paper examines the applicability of findings from behavioral economics to military decision making. Usually manuals concerning the Military Decision Making Process mention general biases in decision making but do not mention specific biases or specific mechanisms for mitigating bias. The author provides examples for different type of bias, which include overconfidence bias, confirmation bias, disconfirmation bias, availability bias, sunk cost fallacy and anchoring bias and proposes ways to mitigate such biases, so that may help militaries to be more accurate in their assessment and thus make better decisions. The author concludes by highlighting that in combination with contextual factors, cognitive biases have been shown to result in starkly inaccurate assessments and therefore poor military decisions at the strategic and operational levels. He highlights that the people need to be cognizant of these biases and to implement strategies to counteract them.

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