Cognitive Bias in Decision-Making with LLMs

Jessica Echterhoff, Yao Liu, Abeer Alessa, Julian McAuley, Zexue He


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) offer significant potential as tools to support an expanding range of decision-making tasks. Given their training on human (created) data, LLMs have been shown to inherit societal biases against protected groups, as well as be subject to bias functionally resembling cognitive bias. Human-like bias can impede fair and explainable decisions made with LLM assistance. Our work introduces BiasBuster, a framework designed to uncover, evaluate, and mitigate cognitive bias in LLMs, particularly in high-stakes decision-making tasks. Inspired by prior research in psychology and cognitive science, we develop a dataset containing 13,465 prompts to evaluate LLM decisions on different cognitive biases (e.g., prompt-induced, sequential, inherent). We test various bias mitigation strategies, while proposing a novel method utilizing LLMs to debias their own human-like cognitive bias within prompts. Our analysis provides a comprehensive picture of the presence and effects of cognitive bias across commercial and open-source models. We demonstrate that our selfhelp debiasing effectively mitigates model answers that display patterns akin to human cognitive bias without having to manually craft examples for each bias.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.739
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12640–12653
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.739
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jessica Echterhoff, Yao Liu, Abeer Alessa, Julian McAuley, and Zexue He. 2024. Cognitive Bias in Decision-Making with LLMs. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 12640–12653, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cognitive Bias in Decision-Making with LLMs (Echterhoff et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.739.pdf