Cognitive validity in design of decision‐aiding techniques

Abstract Issues of the cognitive validity of prescriptive decision‐aiding methods are discussed in this paper. In view of the difficulty of external validation, the focus is on internal validation of the user interface. The following criteria are applied to a variety of decision aid designs: (1) psychologically valid measurement of features impacted by the decision; (2) psychologically valid elicitation of decision maker's preferences incorporated into a decision rule which processes those features; (3) possibility of checking for decision maker's consistency; (4) possibility of providing him/her with an explanation of the aids findings.