The Role of Decision Support in Alleviating the Familiarity Bias

Decision support systems (DSS) have been designed in part to help circumvent human cognitive biases that hinder effective decision making. One bias that has been overlooked in the area of DSS is the familiarity bias. It has been researched primarily for making probability comparisons in the field of social psychology and for making investment decisions in finance, and it has been shown to impair quality decisions. This study explores the role of the familiarity bias in decision making under comparatively ignorant conditions and how decisional information support can be used to offset it. Results showed that the bias does exist and that information does help toward decision accuracy, but there may also be a limited amount of information that will be heeded by decision makers.