Digital Biases and Their Impact on Emergency and Crisis Managerial Work

• In Event: Navigating the Nexus: Governance, Tech, & Infrastructure in Crisis Management

Abstract

We ask how digital technology can change public managers' cognition and behavior by developing a list of biases and heuristics that characterize the digital work environment and have particular impacts for emergency and crisis managerial work. We focus on emergency and crisis management because the pace, urgency, and consequence of the work makes these biases’ impact potentially more pronounced, but the problems posed have implications for the larger public management community. This paper develops theories of biases and heuristics grounded in our quantitative and qualitative data collection.
Crisis management has evolved so that effective social media use and communication across information channels are essential. However the fast-paced environment and the tendency to rely on intuitive thinking over analytical thinking under conditions of incomplete, inaccurate, and/or irrelevant information, digital overload, distractions, and chronic multitasking has the potential to lead to cognitive biases and decision-making errors (Bawden and Robinson 2020). Combined with stress, the digital environment can exacerbate some decision biases including attribution errors and interpreting noise as signals, and it can lead to new ones including digital lock in and digital amnesia. Cognitive biases are well documented in the literature (e.g. Belle et al 2018; Hilbert 2012, but we analyze their application to the digital environments, behavioral patterns, and the habits of mind they promote.
We test the list of biases and heuristics adapted from existing theory against data from a survey of 120 emergency and crisis managers, and a workshop with emergency and crisis mangers drawn from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Among questions we ask are, wat are the temporal dimensions of these biases? Are there first-order (short-term) versus third order (long- term) biases? What managerial behavioral patterns are associate with these biases and heuristics?
There is a debate in the literature over whether biases and heuristics are normatively and functionally bad, or whether they are rational shortcuts that are more efficient than other forms of information processing. We find evidence that they can be both, and we describe implications for the bureaucracy and ossification literatures (Shapiro 2018; Yackee and Yackee 2010), and for how to approach regulation in fast-paced digital environments.

Authors

• Patrick Roberts, Virginia Tech

• Shalini Misra, Virginia Tech