Uncovering ownership bias: The influence of idea goodness and creativity on design professionals' concept selection practices

Xuan Zheng, Scarlett R. Miller

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

Ownership bias is a type of decision making bias that leads to an individual's tendency to prefer their own ideas over the ideas of others during the design process. While prior work has identified the existence of this effect in design professionals, this prior research failed to take into account the social effects of working in a team environment or to identifying the underlying impact of the characteristics of the idea set that impact the effects. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to identify the existence of ownership bias and the factors underlying its existence through two design workshops with 45 design professionals from two engineering companies. Through the study, design professionals individually generated and selected ideas as part of a 2-hour team design challenge. The ideas were rated for their perceived future value through team consensus and for their creativity by expert ratings. The results suggest that design professionals only exhibited ownership bias for ideas that were assessed to have little to no future value in the design process by their team members (low in idea goodness) and the creativity of the ideas did not effect this relationship. However, professionals did show a preference for ideas with high usefulness and low uniqueness, demonstrating a potential bias against creative concepts regardless of ownership.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication30th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology
PublisherAmerican Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
ISBN (Electronic)9780791851845
DOIs
StatePublished - 2018
EventASME 2018 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, IDETC/CIE 2018 - Quebec City, Canada
Duration: Aug 26 2018Aug 29 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ASME Design Engineering Technical Conference
Volume7

Other

OtherASME 2018 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, IDETC/CIE 2018
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityQuebec City
Period8/26/188/29/18

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Mechanical Engineering
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Modeling and Simulation

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