Biases and human behaviour goes hand in hand
In all our decisions, somewhere , in some ways, biases creep in. Whether it is an acquired bias or an innate bias. Sources could be the value systems, beliefs culture, experience, context, logic, thinking style. All these get intertwined in the course of decision making, and impacting the so called quality and thoroughness of the decision so arrived.
Public policy is all about decision making — decisions that are supposed to keep the larger cause of collective welfare and benefit in mind. There is a purpose and there are trade-offs to be dealt with. There is so much of data and information policy professionals deal with, needs to be studied and made sense of. There are so many stakeholders , directly or indirectly, impacted by the policy outcome. There is a competitive element to draw a compelling narrative by each of the interested party.
So many examples abound in policy making that are replete with biases, that have ended up with unintended consequences.
In this milieu of biases how does one stay objective, accurate and impartial?How does one keep these biases at bay?
They say, if one is self aware that a bias exists, that bias is sterilised.
The first step is to recognise that there exists bias. Second step is to get educated on the kind of biases that impact decisions.
- Framing effect — choosing a risky policy depending on how the problem statement is framed. It depends on the interpretation of the problem — one view overriding the other pulls the decision in a certain direction.
- Attention and Salience — ‘what is more important to me as an individual’ plays a big role in seeking the person’s attention and energy. In addition whether the problem which is challenging, but not visible enough to be taken it into consideration
- Confirmation bias — Trying to find evidence that goes along with the existing views, and thus giving more strength to the argument
- Group -Think — Policy are not made in isolation. Keeping oneself detached from the group view, having an independent mind, is an effort, requires conviction and courage to go alone. However, policy making are prone to such short cuts where group consensus shoots down an individual’s common sense on a decision.
- Optimism bias — a tendency to have an overestimation and confidence on favourable outcome. This ignores the risks that may emerge if the outcome is not reached for reasons not taken into account.
- Assumption of similarity bias — ‘thinking on same lines’, ‘‘you are like me’, ‘like minded people’- all these lead to again a kind of group think that tends to drive the decision towards a certain direction
To give some semblance that decision making is more of an art and science, here comes a concept called Regulatory Humility —
As FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen notes that government officials “should resist the urge to simplify, make every effort to tolerate complexity, and develop institutions that are robust in the face of complex and rapidly changing phenomena”
Wisdom is as good as the hindsight!