Исследование влияния когнитивных ловушек и личности на принятие решений руководителями проектов

Behaviour economics is a field that, through empirical research, finds and demonstrates the deviances between rational economic decision making and actual decision making, according to (Ogaki, Masao and Tanaka 2018). The findings are often described as cognitive traps, a form of cognitive bias, and these traps are continuously being discussed, Hammond, John S., Ralph L. Keeney, and Howard Raiffa (1998), wrote an article in Harvard business review about the hidden traps in decision making. They mentioned the Anchoring trap, Status quo trap, Sunk cost trap, Confirming evidence trap, Framing trap, Estimating and forecasting traps and the Recallability trap. The article was cited again in 2014 by Sid Peimer at Stratplanning.com. Razavian, Maryam, Oktay Turetken, and Irene Vanderfeesten (2017), also, more recently, wrote that ”​Despite many business process design approaches and practices that are available, the quality of business process analysis and design relies heavily on human factors. Some of these factors concern cognitive biases.”​
In literature there are indicators that traps, described in the field of Behaviour economics, does not depend on intelligence, rather personality. It has for example been proven that the Myside bias is not related to intelligence ​(Gignac, Gilles E, 2005) and that the Anchoring trap is related to the Big 5 personality trait conscientiousness ​(Eroglu, Cuneyt, and Keely L. Croxton, 2010). So there must be something else that explains susceptibility to cognitive traps better than intelligence. And while some previous research has sporadically found relations between personality and cognitive traps, no collection of theory or theoretic models exist to explain how personality influences cognitive traps, but Ariely (2010, 89-100) hints about a connection to physiology, and consequently to personality (Fisher et al. 2015). The establishment of a basic theoretical understanding through an exploration of relationships between cognitive traps and personality is therefore needed.
A link between personality and cognitive traps could reveal ways to address them. Which would be important for project managers, as well as others to understand, in order to bar against irrational decisions. Assessment and recruiting specialists, who often use personality tests among their tools in search of talent, would also find this knowledge intriguing because they might already be influencing their organization’s susceptibility to certain cognitive traps, unknowingly.
Additionally such knowledge could aid practitioners such as Strategists, because culture is considered a part of personality (O’Reilly et al. 2014). Cultivating organisational culture with the relationship to the Cognitive traps in mind could achieve a desired effect or solution to certain cognitive traps.
But how to do research on the connection between cognitive traps and personality? At hand we have powerful computers and software like “RStudio: Open Source & Professional Software for Data Science Teams.” (Rstudio.com 2020). An exploration could demonstrate a way to analyse the data with the help of inferential statistics, as opposed to descriptive statistics.
To narrow down the research regarding the connection between cognitive traps and personality, in order to have an achievable goal to focus on, we contextualize to project managers. They strike us as suitable, because a project is ​“A temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result.” (Richardson and Jackson (2018, 3). Which indicates that they make decisions that are new in nature, possible without established decision processes or experience with outcome. Additionally we would get some help to make conclusions from Merrow and Nandurdikar (2018), that already did research on what Big 5 personality traits can be considered successfactors for project managers.
The topic is also very interesting because the Big 5 personality traits model is widely used (DeYoung, Carey and Krueger 2016), and if we can connect it to cognitive traps, we open up the possibility to
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derive information regarding cognitive traps from a vast amount of literature. In such literature, we could possibly find new ways to group and define them, for example according to neurochemistry through temperament (Fisher et al. 2010)(Fisher et al. 2015), because research have already shown some links (Fujino et al. 2016).
So we ask the broader research question: “​What are the effects on decision making for project managers, regarding the connection between Big 5 personality traits and cognitive traps?”​ .
And in our exploratory research we aim to:
1. Explore the relationships between cognitive traps and personality traits.
2. Identify the connections between the Big 5 personality traits and the Status quo trap.
3. Identify practical advice for project managers on how to avoid cognitive traps.
The structure of our dissertation is after the introduction:
1. The literature review, that includes the Cognitive traps and personality. That results in the construction of research questions and hypotheses.
2. Methodology. Where we explain our reasoning for our choice of methodologies.
3. Findings & analysis. Where we show the output of our statistical analysis so anyone may infer
their own opinions and insight from them, based on their own competence. But we also present
the reasoning we did, based on these findings in order to conclude.
4. Conclusion & contributions. Where we explain what we derive from our findings, both in
literature and in our statistical analysis.
Finally, in the appendix, we decided to attach all the source code we wrote in R, along with all the data, so that readers of our work may simply “copy paste” from our pdf, and explore the methods and the data themselves.