Cognitive biases in group decision-making – raising awareness through a collaborative serious game

Abstract

The growing importance of collaborative or group decision-making in business projects is accompanied by several challenges, especially cognitive biases. This article focuses on identifying the key cognitive biases that affect group decision-making and explores the potential of a serious role-playing game as a training method to identify group decision-making biases. Using a design science research approach, a game prototype was developed to improve group decision-making in a corporate context by increasing players' awareness of their biased decisions. The findings indicate that there is a need to provide specifically designed games for group decision-making, and only a limited number of existing games are specifically designed for corporate decision-making contexts. Our contribution addresses the lack of training tools such as role-playing that increase cognitive bias awareness for group decision-making in projects, demonstrating the potential of a collaborative serious game to mitigate biases such as groupthink bias, authority bias, and social loafing while providing actionable insights for companies wishing to develop their own game on how to adapt the game’s design and effectiveness. It shows that every bias requires specific game characteristics, such as storyline, feedback mechanisms, and role concepts.