Suchergebnisse

AbstractDo 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.

Abstract. Background: Diabetes continues to be a major health problem around the globe, and low treatment adherence continues to hinder clinical outcomes. Risk perception has been considered to guide the decision-making processes, and in recent years, the bounded rationality theory and cognitive heuristics have proved to be a useful lens to gain insight into informal and irrational reasoning. In particular, heuristics for the estimation of event frequencies and probabilities are considered to be relevant to the field of health behaviors. It is possible that the risk perceptions that determine patients' adherence could be generated by these heuristics. Aims: The purpose of this study is to analyze the role of the representativeness heuristic in risk perceptions related to heart attacks and coronary heart disease (CHD) in a sample of patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D). Method: Cross-sectional study with 342 patients attending a public hospital in an urban setting to treat their diabetes. Results: The heuristic was correlated through both its mechanisms with CHD and heart attack. Evidence suggests that the representativeness heuristic might play a role in probability judgments related to heart complications in patients with T2D. Limitations: Only CHD and heart attack were included in the study, and the heuristic could correlate with the risk perception of other complications as well as the perceived risks and benefits of the diabetes treatment. Conclusion: We call for researchers to further study these heuristics in the context of treatment adherence of T2D patients.