Decision biases and environmental attitudes among conservation professionals

Abstract

The importance of human behavior in biodiversity conservation is widely recognized, but there is little published evidence about how conservation professionals make decisions when conservation values are at stake. We take a behavioral economics approach, administering simplified decision problems (“choice experiments”), questions about choice‐relevant preferences and views (“elicitation questions”), and a psychometric scale (the New Ecological Paradigm scale) to a difficult‐to‐recruit sample (n = 100) of Canadian professionals involved in managing Rangifer tarandus caribou (Woodland Caribou). Our choice experiments reveal the importance of several decision biases (risk aversion, commission bias, and a bias towards fairness) in this influential group of conservation stakeholders. We then examine in‐sample differences between categories of professional affiliation (e.g., resource industry, environmental nongovernmental organization, or federal/provincial government), finding significant variation in responses to one elicitation question (reference points) and in psychometric scores. We discuss the implications of our findings for choice in conservation practice and for multistakeholder conservation policy. Comparing our findings to prior work on choice under uncertainty in nonconservation contexts suggests a possible replication problem in applying behavioral science insights to conservation problems, pointing to the need for a systematic research program. Results from development testing with a convenience sample of university students are presented for comparison throughout the study.

Alleviating Surveyor Bias in Real Estate: An Application to Vacancy and Property Prices

“…The Weberian definition of bias has been widely accepted by numerous governments and organization when enlisting expertise from economists, environmental scientists, engineers, and other professionals (Banuri et al, 2019). Although these professionals in theory should conduct tasks devoid of bias, researchers have reported prevalent biases in information processing and decision-making (Langfeldt, 2004;Malmendier & Tate, 2008;Sukhera et al, 2020;Filewod et al, 2023).…”