Biased Policy Professionals -- World Bank interns are shocked, shocked! by confirmation bias.

Biased Policy Professionals. Sheheryar Banuri, Stefan Dercon, and Varun Gauri. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 8113. https://t.co/Jga1EUEkbF.

A large literature focuses on the biases of individuals and consumers, as well as “nudges” and other policies that can address those biases. Although policy decisions are often more consequential than those of individual consumers, there is a dearth of studies on the biases of policy professionals: those who prepare and implement policy on behalf of elected politicians. Experiments conducted on a novel subject pool of development policy professionals (public servants of the World Bank and the Department for International Development in the United Kingdom) show that policy professionals are indeed subject to decision making traps, including sunk cost bias, the framing of losses and gains, frame-dependent risk-aversion, and, ***most strikingly***, confirmation bias correlated with ideological priors, despite having an explicit mission to promote evidence-informed and impartial decision making. These findings should worry policy professionals and their principals in governments and large organizations, as well as citizens themselves. A further experiment, in which policy professionals engage in discussion, shows that deliberation may be able to mitigate the effects of some of these biases.

My comment: Most strikingly? They are shocked, shocked! that policy professionals show confirmation bias. What they expected? Did they do their homework?

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"If respondents evaluate data objectively and independent of prior beliefs regarding redistribution,
they should have offered equally accurate assessments of the minimum wage study and skin cream
study frames. Alternatively, if respondents are influenced by their ideologies or values, accuracy in
the minimum wage frame should have been lower than in the skin cream frame. In fact, respondents were significantly less accurate in the minimum wage treatments (45% responded with the correct answer) relative to the skin cream treatments (65% responded with the correct answer [...]"

Check also: Dispelling the Myth: Training in Education or Neuroscience Decreases but Does Not Eliminate Beliefs in Neuromyths. Kelly Macdonald et al. Frontiers in Psychology, Aug 10 2017.  http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/08/training-in-education-or-neuroscience.html

And: Wisdom and how to cultivate it: Review of emerging evidence for a constructivist model of wise thinking. Igor Grossmann. European Psychologist, in press. http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/08/wisdom-and-how-to-cultivate-it-review.html