Insights from an Initial Exploration of Cognitive Biases in Spatial Decisions

The need and interest to consider cognitive and motivational biases has been recognized in many different disciplines (e.g. economics, operational research, decision theory, finance) and has recently reached environmental decision-making. Within this domain, the intrinsic presence of a spatial dimension of both alternatives and criteria calls for the use of geographical maps throughout the decision-making process to properly represent the spatial distribution of the features under analysis. This makes Spatial Multi Criteria Decision Aiding (SMCDA) a particularly interesting domain to explore new implications of cognitive and motivational biases. The present chapter presents and discusses the results of a literature review of recent applications of Spatial Multi Criteria Decision Aiding across different domains. The objective of the study is to enlighten possible biases in both the design of spatial MCDA models and in the interpretation of their results. The proposed review and classification of the relevant literature is expected to have important implications for spatial decision-making procedures, by generating better awareness on (i) the meta-choices available to model builders when designing Spatial Multi Criteria Decision Aiding processes and (ii) the consequences of these meta-choices on human judgment for both the facilitators of the modeling processes and the users of the models