Spooky Judgments: How Agents Think About Danger
Wray Herbert
... Whatever one thinks of Edward Snowden, hero or traitor or something in between, his revelations about sweeping NSA surveillance have gotten America’s attention ...
We hire and train intelligence agents to weigh risks and make judgments, and most of us want to believe that these assessments are sound. But how rational are the individual men and women who are making the life-and-death decisions that influence national security?
A new study raises some serious questions about our usual view of rationality, and how it applies to intelligence agents’ judgments about risk. Cornell University psychological scientist Valerie Reyna, one of the nation’s experts on risk assessment and decision making, persuaded a federal intelligence agency to let her study agents’ thinking. She found a pattern of irrational judgments about risk. In fact, college students were better than intelligence agents at weighing danger in a technical, logical way ...
Based on 30 gain-loss framing decisions, not only did the federal agents exhibit larger framing biases than college students, they were also more confident in their judgments. The post-college adults occupied an interesting middle ground between the students and agents: They were as flawed in their choices as the students—sometimes more so—but less cognitively biased than the intelligence agents ...
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/were-only-human/spooky-judgments-how-spies-think-about-danger.html
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