An Experimental Study on Mechanisms of Human Errors at Decision-Making Process under Time Pressure

Abstract

Human errors of operators’ decision making may have significant influence on the reliability of sociotechnical systems. Time pressure is one of the influencing factors affecting the possibility of human errors. In the present study, the effect of time pressure on the strategic decision making has been investigated using a simple but strategic task. As a result, it has been demonstrated that the strategy of participants has changed under the highly time pressured situation, implying that heuristic approaches leading to incorrect answers may have been adopted. The participants tended to try as many options as they found in the cases, but they could not decide a correct choice as correct one because of lack of time for repeated evaluation. In addition, such evaluated choices would have not been checked again under the highly time pressured conditions. In other words, once the correct choice has been evaluated but missed, the choice would not be evaluated again in the highly time-pressured situation. This may be an essential mechanism of decision-error demonstrated in the present experiment. If there has been enough time to evaluate options on the other hand, the participants have been able to choose correct answer even if they have not been able to realize the correct choice in the first choice. This implies that keeping sufficient time to acquire higher situation awareness is quite important for reliable strategic decision making.