Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life
Vol. 8(4); March (2022), pp. 253–258
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2991/jrnal.k.211108.005; ISSN 2405-9021; eISSN 2352-6386
https://www.atlantis-press.com/journals/jrnal

Research Article

Cognitive Biases as a Clue to Creating Diversified Stories
Jun Nakamura*
Faculty of Global Management, Chuo University, Higashinakano 742-1, Hachioji-shi, Tokyo 192-0393, Japan

ARTICLE INFOABSTRACT

Article History

A wide variety of stories can be created from the same material. The author asked several teams to create stories, focusing on
cognitive biases. As expected, a variety of stories were created by each team, and cognitive biases were identified in the processof creating them. In other words, if it is assumed that cognitive bias is a driving force behind the creator’s intentions, then it canbe concluded that the creator must have a certain strong intention when creating a story.

Received 23 November 2020
Accepted 30 August 2021
Keywords
Story
cognitive bias
analogycreativity© 2021 The Author. Published by Atlantis Press International B.V.
This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

1. INTRODUCTION
The word “creativity” can be used to describe a wide range of products, depending on what one is creating. The product may be an
object, a service, or a new technology. Whatever the case, to attract
people, it is important to tell a “narrative story”, and I believe thatan attractive story makes a deep impression on people and inspires
them to remember it.
I have been studying the process of designing and generating stories. In doing so, I have focused on how the characteristics of stories
change depending on the presence or absence of external stimuli[1]. This paper is focused, first, on the effects of availability heuristics, termed cognitive biases in this paper, such as the selective useof memory. I explore the process by which different teams given thesame data set create different stories.
Section 2 touches on related research and experimental tools.
Next, Section 3 describes stories’ impression points, items forassessing cognitive biases, and method to assess diversity of created stories. This is followed by Section 4, which introduces anexperiment based on participants’ self-assessment. The results ofthe experiment are then presented in Section 5. This is followed bya discussion aimed at analyzing and interpreting the results of theexperiment, and the final Section offers a conclusion.

2. RELATED RESEARCH AND
EXPERIMENTAL TOOLAs an area of research in support of activities to create stories, theaim was to develop games that enhance composition and creativity
Email: jyulis.77f@g.chuo-u.ac.jp*

to reconstruct combinations of words and thereby create new concepts. The importance of the meaning and role of words in thedesign process, which is a creative activity, has been noted [2]. The
game developed is aimed at connecting words by analogy [3] anddiscovering new expressions in various combinations. It is called
the Analogy Game [4].
This type of game falls into the category of “serious games” inthe broadest sense of the word. Serious games are defined as“games used to solve problems in education and other areas ofsociety” [5]. Examples would include training in firefighting
activities, emergency and medical training, and language learning. Overseas, the use of serious games to address the issue ofthe educational use of games has been attracting attention [6].
Since this analogy game was aimed at fostering composition andcreativity, it is of a type that players explore and structure bythemselves [7].
The gaming interface was developed as in Figure 1 as an experimental tool. Here, the “player” initially finds 20 words (items), eachshown in a small-square node (Figure 1A). These words are set
considering any objective relevance. Then, the player categorizes
the words so as to make clusters, by dragging the node freely on
the screen, according to his/her subjective awareness of the analogy(Figure 1B).
When the player notices the emergence of a concept based on
his own arrangement or due to dynamical shift of his cognition,
he/she can subscribe the concept by filling in the balloon as in
Figure 1C. And, if the player finds a common concept corresponding to a cluster on the display, he/she can color the node in thecluster following his awareness.
Via this procedure, we expect the player to create new stories
underlying his/her own arrangements.

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J. Nakamura / Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life 8(4) 253–258

Figure 1 | Flow of the analogy game.

3. STORY IMPRESSION POINTSAND ASSESSMENT
The aim of the experimental tool mentioned in the previous Section
was to support creative activities [8]. The present Section explainsimpression points in story creation as a deliverable self-assessment
through debriefing after the game.

3.1. Story Impression Points
It has been suggested that creativity can be evaluated from the viewpoints of originality and novelty as well as practicality and appropriateness [9]. Therefore, the author concluded that “Innovative”
and “Feasible” are appropriate as impression points for created stories. Of these two items, I used the term “innovative” as a single
term so that the difference between originality and novelty could be
judged intuitively without having to be broken down into details.
Feasible is also used in the same way, and “practically and appropriateness” are combined into feasible.

This paper aimed to use metacognition to explore the source ofstory creation. For this purpose, as described in the first Section,
the participants were asked to self-assess relevant characteristics,
considering the availability heuristics such as people’s selective useof memory, as forms of cognitive bias. In this case, what are thetypes of cognitive bias? Bazerman and Moore [13] identified 11
types of bias that can occur during decision making. In this paper,
four of these were selected for consideration in creative activities,
excluding quantitative items.
•• Ease of Recall: cognitive bias that occurs toward easily recalled
material based on the clarity of memory.
•• Retrievability: cognitive bias toward an object to be rememberedthat is structurally easy to retrieve.
•• Confirmation trap: cognitive bias based on the assumption thatone’s own hypothesis is correct.
•• Anchoring effect: cognitive bias toward available information
as a starting point and tendency not to move far beyond thatanchor.
Based on the above, the assessment items for cognitive bias wereorganized in this experiment as follows.
Assessment item 1 (memory versus hypothesis)
1-X = Recalling someone’s memories of past events affected yourideas.
1-Y = Not your memories but your team’s own tentative hypothesis
affected your ideas.
Assessment item 2 (stuck to the cards versus took off from cards)

In addition, three impression points, Usefulness, Scale expansion,
and Barrier to rival, were added, with reference to the value proposition design proposed by Imazu [10],1 which excluded quantitative evaluation points. For example, in the case of a multifunctional
printer, score of “usefulness” would be high if the product is developed in-house and particularly integrated with after-sales service
in consideration of user’s counterpart. Sales expansion could score
low because if consumables and after-sales service are used as ongoing income, labor costs will be a drag in securing maintenance personnel. Barrier to rival becomes a high score because it is difficult
to imitate if the product is inexpensive and has good performance.

2-X = You were affected by the meaning of a given set of cards andcontinued to stick with that until the end.

Therefore, the following five items were identified as the impression points for created stories in this paper: Innovation, Feasibility,
Usefulness, Scale expansion, and Barrier to rival.

Assessment item 1-X was combined with Ease of recall and
Retrievability because both were types of cognitive bias related toones’ memory of the past. On the other hand, assessment item 1-Y
asked the participants whether they felt a cognitive bias suggestingthat they believe their hypothesis is correct as a confirmation trap
or as a memory of the past.

3.2. Assessment on Cognitive Biases
Next, the assessment items for cognitive biases are introduced. In
relation to cognitive biases, self-awareness is metacognition [11].
In another words, cognition that monitors, controls, and evaluates
itself is called metacognition. Wells [12] developed metacognitive therapy, which attempts to utilize metacognition as a type oftherapy rather than a training method. It is characterized by theories and therapeutic techniques based on cognitive information
processing.
She is an evangelist in Japan for the Business Model Generation.

1

2-Y = You were influenced by a given set of cards, but the idea took
off from that.
Assessment item 3 (not shared versus shared)
3-X = During the team discussion, a unique idea arose that was notshared by other individuals.
3-Y = The ideas were sufficient using only the information shared
among team members.

Assessment item 2-X asked whether the participants recognized
the anchoring effect, which is a type of cognitive bias, and assessment item 2-Y asked whether they recognized the expansion of
their ideas without their being anchored to a given card.
Assessment item 3 was not a straightforward question of cognitive bias, but it asked for “bounded awareness” in conducting
teamwork. In the post-experimental review, assessment item 3-X
asked participants whether they felt that the information that they
considered useful (i.e., the cognitive bias of the confirmation trap
was also present here) was ignored or overlooked. In contrast toJ. Nakamura / Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life 8(4) 253–258

3-X, assessment item 3-Y asked whether the respondents felt thatthe information that they found useful was sufficiently shared andagreed upon within the team.

3.3. Assessment on Diversity
Prior to analyzing the cognitive biases on created stories, we will
see how the Analogy Game introduced in the previous section isused to create various stories. For this assess, the Levenshtein distance will be measured to see how different two strings are, andit measures how many times at least one of the strings needs tobe changed (inserted, deleted, or replaced) by a single character tomake the two strings match. The minimum cost of insertion, deletion, and replacement is calculated as shown below, and a macro
is assembled and calculated where 1 is a perfect match and 0 is aperfect mismatch.

255

and the present one is that this was an experiment not with one
team but with six teams. Participants were instructed to devise astory connecting several newly reconstructed clusters (a set of wordcards) using the experimental tool. The story was to be expressedin PowerPoint using a copy of the screen created with the experimental tool. The story was then presented to the participants. Afterthe presentation of the story, participants were asked to do the following two tasks:•• Give a score to stories created by teams other than your own,
taking into account the impression points mentioned in Section 3.
•• Assess what cognitive biases were present in response to yourown team using the assessment items described in Section 3.

5. RESULTS

cost = 0

Even though the word cards provided in the experiment were
the same for all teams, different teams created different stories(Table 1). The results for the Levenshtein distance are as follows. In
spite of the fact that the initial values are the same, it is confirmedthat the distance between each story is divergent. However, it is
not a semantic distance, but a formal one. In order to measure thesemantic distance, the role of the participants becomes important.

cost = 1

The impression point scores for the six teams are shown in
Figure 2, with team 4 receiving the highest rating.

For row = 1 To Length1
For col = 1 To Length2
If (Strings.Mid(Line1, row, 1)) = (Strings.Mid(Line2, col, 1))
Then
Else
End If Grid(row, col) = Application.Min (Application.
Min (Grid(row − 1, col) + 1, Grid(row, col − 1) + 1),
Grid(row − 1, col − 1) + cost)
cost = Length1
If Length2 > Length1 Then cost = Length2
LebenshteinDistance = (100 − (Grid(Length1, Length2) *100)/cost)/100

4. EXPERIMENTIn this paper, we conducted an experiment using the analogy gameintroduced in Section 2 in the following manner:
Experiment date: Friday, November 27, 2020
Participants: 21 second-year students of the Faculty of Global
Management, Chuo University
Experimental method: 21 people were divided into six teams andpresented with a set of word cards on the screen as follows. Capitalletters in the following indicate the names of the clusters, andlower-case letters indicate individual words on the cards.

The team 4 story that received the best ratings was the following:
Story theme. Four things that the students on Working Holiday needmight be Cheap clothes, Information, Relax and Tour.
Story. Since they are working in foreign countries to earn money,
study a language, and learn the culture at the same time, it is betterto save clothing money and travel around if they have time. To savemoney on their clothing, it would be better for them to purchase orborrow seasonal clothes at a sales market or garage sale. Also, since
it will be difficult to get information in foreign countries, where
they do not have friends or family, they might need to use an online
Table 1 | Levenshtein distance between teams
Team-1
Team-1
Team-2
Team-3
Team-4
Team-5
Team-6

0.06
0.10
0.05
0.13
0.10

Team-2 Team-3 Team-4

0.10
0.07
0.09
0.10

0.10
0.10
0.09

0.10
0.08

Team-50.09•• 
TRIP ADVISOR: discount ticket, foreign tour, backpacker,
guide, word of mouth•• FACEBOOK: search, friends, like!, share, network•• IKEA LIFE: living room, do it yourself, easy to store, Europe,
wardrobe•• STARBACKS: yen400, third place, extra job, coffee, steamer
The above set of word cards is the same as that used in our previous
experiment [1]. The difference between the previous experiment

Figure 2 | Impression points rating by team.

Team-6

J. Nakamura / Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life 8(4) 253–258

256

community to get various kinds of information during their working holidays. Finally, it is important to relax after work every day.
An interesting slide from the team 4 presentation is shown in
Figure 3.
This was written by one of the team members during trial and error
as a draft, and when she introduced it to the rest of the team, they
marveled, saying with “Hi, hi, hi! Referring to a recording of themembers conversation, it was able to extract the flow of the discussion as follows.
(1) The first four words that stood out to me were, “Do it yourself ”, “coffee”, “extra-job”, and “Europe”. I decided to connect
the four.
(2) Think of it this way, it’s a working holiday! That is said, a parttime job in a foreign country is indeed a working holiday!
(3) On a working holiday, you have to do it all by yourself.
(4) As a mini-story derived from the above, on a working holiday we need to save money, we might want to go on a tourin our free time, we might need to relax, and we might need
information.
The results of the self-assessment from all of participants are shownin Table 2.

6. DISCUSSION
In this Section, we discuss cognitive biases and the structural formsof story representation that we uncovered in the course of ouranalysis.

6.1. Cognitive Biases
Focusing on teams 4 and 3, which had the highest ratings, whatkind of cognitive biases did the team members feel? In team 4, themost remarkable assessment item that the team member reported
was item 2-Y, which was unique compared to the other teams. This
indicates that they did not stick to the given key words until the end,
and they perceived themselves to have made a leap in the meaningof the words. This may be due to the so-called polysemy effect, inwhich a given key word has multiple meanings [14]. It could be said
that blending a meaning that is different from the original meaning[15] produced a creative story. In fact, as introduced the thinking
process of team 4, the first four keywords (Do it yourself, coffee,
extra-job, and Europe) were noteworthy, and through brainstorming using this mini-story as an opportunity, the other keywords
were connected to form the whole story.
The second most highly rated team was team 3, which, like team 4,
showed characteristic cognitive biases that were different from theother teams. Team 3 had a higher rating on item 1-X than the otherteams, i.e., they felt that their memories were more effective in generating stories than were their own free ideas and hypotheses. The
possible reasons for this are discussed below.
In the case of team 3, it might be presumed that memory was given
priority because the consensus was that teamwork must take precedence over mutually agreed-upon ideas, resulting in the hypothesesof various participants cancelling each other out. However, team 4,
the most highly rated team, gave the opposite answer. That is, team 4
responded with a free hypothesis that was not anchored in their own
memory. This contrast is quite interesting. Given that teams 4 and 3
did not respond uniquely to the question, it is difficult to figure out
the story-generating algorithm. However, at least from the above
results, we can say that the cognitive biases of assessment items
1 and 2, whether X or Y, are characteristically different to thoseof the other teams (i.e., representing highest or lowest awareness).
Now, we discuss assessment item 3. For both team 3 and 4, assessment item Y was ranked higher than item X. This implies thatboth teams seemed to be in a good environment for the members
to share their opinions with each other. The trends in the scoresof teams 3 and 4 on team cooperation in Assessment item 3 aresimilar, but when we refer to the feedback from the participants
after the experiment, subtle differences are highlighted, which arecorrelated with the scores. Although the number of members ofeach team is equal to three, both positive and negative opinions are
mixed in the feedback comments. Here, I dare to give an example
representing negative comments as follows:
Team 3:Through actual group work, we were able to experience the processof who to target as customers, what kind of products to create, andhow to promote them. Even though we were able to study how it
was done, when it comes to trying it, the target customers were notsufficiently narrowed down, or we could not come up with the idea
in the first place.

Figure 3 | A slide representing the thinking process.
Table 2 | Self-assessment of cognitive biases
STDTeam-1 Team-2 Team-3 Team-4 Team-5 Team-6 AVE
EVP
1-X
1-Y
2-X
2-Y
3-X
3-Y

3.00
7.00
3.00
7.00
0.75
9.25

4.25
5.75
4.25
5.75
4.00
6.00

7.00
3.00
5.33
4.67
2.67
7.33

3.00
7.00
2.67
7.33
2.00
8.00

2.67
7.33
5.00
5.00
4.67
5.33

0.50
9.50
5.50
4.50
0.25
9.75

3.40
6.60
4.29
5.71
2.39
7.61

1.96
1.96
1.11
1.11
1.60
1.60

Team 4:The AG game was the most impressive task activity for me.
Through this activity, I learned that people have different experiences that will affect our thinking process. Despite the fact thatpeople have different experiences and thinking processes, there arecertain points that people can generally emphasize and understand.
I thought it was important to narrow it down to a point where
people can usually emphasize concepts or stories, especially

J. Nakamura / Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life 8(4) 253–258

when it comes to marketing. When I thought of marketing as
the meaning of promotional activities, I generally thought thatbeing emphasized by people was one of the important conditions
that marketing should have. In that respect, I learned that thinking about a new plot or promotion in any keyword or productrequires feasibility, usefulness, creativity, and innovation.
The following can be inferred from the above. That means, although
they both admitted that there were challenges in teamwork, team 4
learned by acknowledging and overcoming these challenges. In
particular, I would like to focus on this sentence, i.e., “Despite thefact that people have different experiences and thinking processes,
there are certain points that people can generally emphasize andunderstand.”The recording also showed that in team 3, the leader of the teamgave consideration to the remaining two members (the leader ofteam 5, which had the lowest score, was more of an opinion leader
and gave limited consideration to the remaining members), while
in Team 4, one member was quiet and reserved in her comments
but two members had lively conversations as if they were friends
rather than leaders. This suggests that team 4 scored relatively
higher than team 3 in assessment item 3 because they understoodthat teamwork is about acknowledging and understanding eachother’s arguments.
Thus, since the analogy game is a sort of mechanism that encourages creativity, it can be inferred that organizational governance,such as a leader, does not encourage creativity, but rather a freer
and more equal relationship is desired, to some extent.
On the other hand, for team 5, which had the lowest score, X
was higher than Y, indicating that individual opinions were notreflected. Indeed, from my observations, I had the impression that
one leader created the whole story and the details, while the othermembers were, in a sense, listeners. That means that no chemical
reaction yielding new ideas occurred in the mix of different opinions from the team members.
In relation to cognitive bias, the team operation that is well conducted such as team 3 and 4, have removed their members’ cognitive
bias by accepting each other’s emphasis and trying to understandeach other. Therefore, it is assumed that their environment is conducive to chemical reactions between ideas, and interesting story
ideas are generated.

6.2. Structural Forms of Story Presentation
There is one interesting feature in the artifacts of the stories thatshowed a difference in the evaluation of this experiment. It is thepresentation of the structure of the story. At first glance, there is
not much difference between team 4 and 5 in terms of the text, andin fact, team 5, the worst team, seems to have a longer and better
thought-out story. However, looking at the presentation slides, it
became clear whether the story had a title or not, whether it had
structural features or not, and so on.
As a matter of fact, team 3, the second team in the evaluation
ranking, also used structural expressions in their explanations tomake it easier for the audience to understand. Indeed, in Analogy
Game, since there are multiple bundles of words, each bundle hasa meaning, and it is natural to construct a story by connecting the257bundles. On the other hand, in team 5, there is no structure-like
expression anywhere, and the story seems to have been connectedby simply scattering the given cards (words) in the text.
This suggests that it is important for a story to have a title and astructure, and that the presentation of the structure facilitatescomprehensibility.

7. CONCLUSION
Through the experiments using the analogy game, various stories
were created and could be observed. Stories have infinite possibilities, depending on the combination of the given words, the ideasof the members, and the ideas and inspiration of their chemical
reactions. In particular, I found that even with the same given data,
it is not just a matter of saying that it varies from person to person,
but that the complex trial and error caused by the cognitive biases
therein can produce stories that were initially unimaginable.
With regard to cognitive biases, those were evident throughout theexperiment in the process of creating stories. In other words, if we
assume that cognitive biases are the driving force behind the creator’s intentions, then it is essential that the creator have a certain
strong intention to yield a memorable story.
The experiment in this paper, however, is just a case study of alimited number of people, and there are still many works to beaddressed before the findings can be generalized. In the future, theauthor intends to focus more on the process of creating stories.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
The author declares no conflicts of interest.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This study was carried out with the cooperation of undergraduate students of Chuo University, Japan. Also, the Analogy Gamewas upgraded and developed further with the support of Mr. Tano,
President of Expert Gig Co., Ltd. This research was supported
by Kakenhi (JSPS KAKENHI Grants Numbers 17K03872 and
19K03062).

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AUTHOR INTRODUCTION
Dr. Jun Nakamura
He is a Professor of Faculty of Global
Management at Chuo University in Japan. He is
graduated from the Department of Technology
Management for Innovation, Graduate School ofEngineering, University of Tokyo, with highest
honors. His area of research is cognitive sciences.

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