The Effects of Cognitive Style and Prior Information on Multi-Stage Decisionmaking

Drawing on the decisionmaking literature and on an initial ROC experiment a research design was formulated to investigate multi-stage decisionmaking and cognitive style in conditions of uncertainty. Subjects participating in the simulation experiment were required to discriminate between missile attack or a missile test condition based on probabilistic imperfect information. Results from the signal detection analyses replicated the earlier effects: subjects possessing an analytic style made significantly better discriminations than subjects exhibiting a global style. ANOVA results showed that subjects held higher attack probabilities: (1) in attack conditions, (2) when missile site attack probability was high, (3) as the heat sensor range moved closer to in-missile range, and (4) with each succeeding report. All the two-way interactions proved significant as were two of the three-ways. Overall, subjects demonstrated a strong bias in favor of prior information to gauge attack probability and when that source was weak attempted to use the heat signature information. It was also possible to devise a normative-descriptive model of the subject's multistage decisionmaking that fit the data quite well.