Politicians, the representativeness heuristic and decision-making biases

How likely is this policy to be a success? What is the probability that my party gains seats if we change our policy position? Politicians often have to answer such questions and thus make judgements. To facilitate the oftentimes difficult process of judgement, people regularly apply heuristics (cognitive rules of thumb). Using heuristics may, however, result in decision-making biases that can be detrimental.

In this Political Behavior-article ‘Politicians, the representativeness heuristic and decision-making biases’, Barbara Vis and Sjoerd Stolwijk focus on the representativeness heuristic. People use the representativeness heuristic when they judge a specific situation or event based on the similarity between the situation or event and a general category, whereby similarity can be based on for instance stereotypes or frequent events. For example, when politicians think negatively about whole groups of people because of the activities of some, they also rely on the representativeness heuristic. By potentially leading to such biases, the representativeness heuristic can negatively influence the functioning of democracy.

This study shows that politicians display biases related to the representativeness heuristic. The representativeness heuristic has wide applicability to many domains of decision making. For example, it may lead to inefficient public spending. Overall, the findings increase the understanding of how politicians process information and how this influences their judgements and decision making.

Read more about this study and its outcomes here (in English and in Dutch).

Authors of this research article are Barbara Vis, Professor of Politics & Governance at Utrecht University School of Governance and Sjoerd Stolwijk, post doc Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.