Civil Engineering and Environmental Systems would like to announce a Best Paper Award winner for 2020 as chosen by the journal’s editors. The award goes to the paper ‘Bias and decision making – an overview systems explanation’ (Volume 37, Issue 1) by David Carmichael, along with the discussion by David Elms (Volume 37, Issue 3) and the author’s response.
Carmichael’s paper develops a solid theoretical foundation for inclusion of human factors into civil engineering systems. The paper classifies and systematically analyses human subjectivity. The paper by Carmichael analyses separate issues such as prejudice, optimism, conflict of interest, confirmation bias, and more with a systems analysis of model, constraints, and objective functions.
The discussion by Elms makes the important point that subjectivity is not inherently bad, and looks to refocus the paper away from the contested word of ‘bias’. Better management of many issues involving human subjectivity will require objective, in addition to subjective analysis, and this paper and discussion provide a way for other researchers to do so.