Politicians, the Representativeness Heuristic and Decision-Making Biases

Abstract

Do politicians use the representativeness heuristic when making judgements, that is, when they appraise the likelihood or frequency of an outcome that is unknown or unknowable? Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts that facilitate judgements and decision making. Oftentimes, heuristics are useful, but they may also lead to systematic biases that can be detrimental for decision making in a representative democracy. Thus far, we lack experimental evidence on whether politicians use the representativeness heuristic. To contribute to and extend the existing literature, we develop and conduct a survey experiment with as main participants Dutch elected local politicians from the larger municipalities (n = 211). This survey experiment examines whether politician participants display two decision-making biases related to the representativeness heuristic: the conjunction error and scope neglect. We also run the experiment with a student sample (n = 260), mainly to validate the experimental design. Our findings show that politician participants neglect scope in one scenario and that they display the conjunction error in two of three scenarios. These results suggest that politician participants use the representativeness heuristic. Conversely, our third conjunction error scenario does not find evidence for politician participants displaying this bias. As we discuss in the article, the latter may be an artifact of our experimental design. Overall, our findings contribute fundamentally to our understanding of how politicians process information and how this influences their judgements and decision making.

The Limits of Institutions and the Reliance on Heuristics during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Representativeness : The representativeness heuristic—when a leader judges probabilities “by the degree to which A is representative of B, that is, by the degree to which A resembles B” (Tversky and Kahneman 1974:1124)—may be one of the most highly used heuristics by a policymaker (Stolwijk and Vis 2021). It can be conjectured that, the longer one has been in a job, the more they have seen and thus the more they are likely to frame the next crisis in terms of previous ones and act accordingly.…”

Heuristics and policy responsiveness: a research agenda

“…H&B focuses on two so-called general purpose heuristics (Kahneman and Frederick, 2002 ): availability (Tversky and Kahneman 1973 ; Schwarz and Vaughn 2002 ) and representativeness (Kahneman and Frederick 2002 ; Stolwijk 2020 ; Stolwijk and Vis 2021 ; Tversky and Kahneman 1974 ) which subsume many other heuristics. 2 In general, people use the availability heuristic when assessing how likely it is that something occurs by focusing on the ease with which they can think of instances or occurrences of it.…”

“…Most work to date comes from the field of foreign policy (e.g., Jervis 1976 , 1986 ; see McDermott 2001 ), but there are also some more recent studies from the field of comparative politics. For example, Stolwijk and Vis ( 2021 ) demonstrated by means of a survey experiment that Dutch local politicians displayed evidence of two biases related to the representativeness heuristic (Kahneman and Tversky 1972 ): the conjunction error (i.e., assuming an actor has an attribute based on having a characteristic) and scope neglect (i.e., people’s tendency to neglect the scope of a representative event). Moreover, Weyland ( 2007 ) showed in his analysis of social security reform in Latin America that hard-pressed policymakers used the availability heuristic (Tversky and Kahneman 1973 ) by adopting a highly visible policy reform, even though that reform may be unsuitable for their context.…”

The impact of heuristics on political behavior*Egypt’s Morsi as a case study

“…In regards to elites, Miler (2009) argues that elites sometimes misinterpret the wishes of their constituents due to heuristics which said elites employ to expect their constituent's demands, this occurs due to biases and incomplete information, and thus we see the effect of the availability heuristic on political behavior, to this extent, an important part of the research is that representatives, especially congressional ones might misrepresent their constituents, it could be said that decisions based on heuristics are definitely inefficient if said elites would have decided otherwise with more knowledge, these heuristics are more likely to come about as a result of the information environment, which constrains representatives from identifying with and understanding the large and varied numbers of constituents, frequency is an important determiner of the accessibility of information, as repetition increases the association of the constituents and the elite, and the elite with the demand at hand, representatives are then encouraged to seek a more thorough examination of their constituents needs as opposed to reliance on freely recalled information, which would lead representatives closer to the ideal of representing all their constituents. Furthermore, Stolwijk and Vis (2021) postulate that systematic biases for elites stemming from heuristics can have a harmful impact on representative democracy, said elites use the representativeness heuristic which could cause biases to arise as a result of generalizations, policy measures stemming from these generalization might be unjust, harmful and problematic, time pressure seems to contribute to the usage of this heuristic along with having staff who are likeminded or with similar identities, who are likely to replicate the same biases.…”