Bias and decision making – an overview systems explanation

ABSTRACT People are continuously making decisions, most of a minor nature, but also some of significance. Few people seem to enquire as to the basis of their decisions or as to why one decision is chosen over another, while in some cases people may not be fully cognisant of how decision making is happening. For any given situation, provided it is not over-constrained, everyone reaches a different decision. That is, any decision can be perceived to involve bias, simply because it is different to someone else's decision, with this difference being attributed to a range of bias sources. It is generally not possible to establish the actual bias sources in any given situation. Accordingly, this paper adopts an overview systems approach to explaining bias in contrast to conventional social science treatments of bias. Bias sources and decisions are linked through looking at the essential underlying components involved in decision making. Some elementary experiments demonstrate that, for a given situation, all people will arrive at different underlying components and hence different decisions, implying the presence of bias. The paper is original in offering a different perspective of bias and linking systems thinking with the literature on bias.