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.
Highlights
Politicians—such as members of parliament, ministers, or presidents—often have to make judgements, that is ‘appraisals about the likelihood, probability or frequency of an outcome which is unknown or unknowable’ (McDermott 2001: 7)
If we find that politician participants display the conjunction error in this scenario, in which they are arguably least likely to respond in their role as politicians, this means that the sample is not a priori different from samples that have been used previously
In line with the conjunction error hypothesis (H1), we found that 134 politicians (72%, n = 186)18 committed the conjunction error by ranking the likelihood of Vera being both active in the feminist movement and a bank employee to be higher than one of its constituents, see Fig. 1
Summary
Politicians—such as members of parliament, ministers, or presidents—often have to make judgements, that is ‘appraisals about the likelihood, probability or frequency of an outcome which is unknown or unknowable’ (McDermott 2001: 7). A second scenario to assess whether the politician participants display biases related to the representativeness heuristic is the causal conjunction test (Tversky and Kahneman 1983).
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