Choiceology's Guide to Better Decisions: With Guests James Korris, Carey Morewedge & Jack Soll

May 20, 2024
What are some strategies that can help you mitigate cognitive biases and make better decisions?

After you listen

Cognitive and emotional biases can have a big impact on your financial life. 

  • To learn more about de-biasing techniques and how to approach a variety of specific financial decisions—like how to save for college or what to do with an old 401(k)—check out the Financial Decoder podcast

Over the years, Choiceology has offered a lot of advice for making better decisions. In this special episode of Choiceology with Katy Milkman, we bring you the story of a video game that is surprisingly effective at reducing decision errors, and you'll hear about a practical checklist for improving choices in many different contexts.

Solving fictitious mysteries might sound like fun and games, but the video game MISSING: The Pursuit of Terry Hughes was designed with a serious purpose in mind: to help intelligence analysts avoid decision-making traps. In 2015, James Korris and Carey Morewedge worked together to design a video game for the intelligence agency IARPA, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, and measured the biases exhibited before and after playing the series of 90-minute games. The results were remarkable and extremely durable.

James Korris is president and CEO of Creative Technologies Inc. in Los Angeles, and is a pioneer in immersive game-based simulation for military learning. You can see a preview of the game James designed titled MISSING: The Pursuit of Terry Hughes.

Next, Katy speaks with Carey Morewedge about the game and about his research on effective decision-debiasing techniques. You can learn more in the paper Carey co-authored with James titled "Debiasing Decisions: Improved Decision Making With a Single Training Intervention."

Carey Morewedge is a professor of marketing at Boston University Questrom School of Business who studies psychological biases and how to reduce them. 

Finally, Katy speaks with Jack Soll to hear his checklist of four simple ways to debias yourself before making decisions, big or small. You can read more in the article Jack and Katy co-authored with John Payne titled "Outsmart Your Own Biases.

Jack Soll is the Gregory Mario & Jeremy Mario Distinguished Professor of Management and Organizations at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. 

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