INDIVIDUAL AND TEAM COGNITIVE BIASES THAT MAY AFFECT ENGINEERS' ASSESSMENTS AND DECISIONS ON RISK

Cognitive biases play a significant role in decision-making processes within engineering, particularly when it comes to assessing risks associated with technology and making decisions regarding the mitigation of those risks, but while these topics have been explored in a variety of contexts like economics and medicine, current research of these processes in engineering is limited. This paper presents a review of research into engineering decision making and the effects that cognitive biases have on this process. Seventeen experimental studies were reviewed for their insights on these critical questions. While sample sizes are small, and professional engineers have rarely been involved in these experiments, several risk-relevant cognitive biases were confirmed, and some avenues for mitigation of those biases have been explored. These results highlight the critical need for further research in this area, and that more fundamentally sound organization, increasing diversity of research funding and management are needed. These include the investigation of engineering teams, of which only 4 of the 17 included studies have so far explored, with the functioning of teams in the identification and mitigation of risk being current standard engineering practice and critical to the continued safe implementation of technologies to make the world a better place.