Designing to Debias: Measuring and Reducing Public Managers’ Anchoring Bias

Abstract

Public managers’ decisions are affected by cognitive biases. For instance, employees’ previous year's performance ratings influence new ratings irrespective of actual performance. Nevertheless, experimental knowledge of public managers’ cognitive biases is limited, and debiasing techniques have rarely been studied. Using a survey experiment on 1,221 public managers and employees in the United Kingdom, this research (1) replicates two experiments on anchoring to establish empirical generalization across institutional contexts and (2) tests a consider‐the‐opposite debiasing technique. The results indicate that anchoring bias replicates in a different institutional context, although effect sizes differ. Furthermore, a low‐cost, low‐intensity consider‐the‐opposite technique mitigates anchoring bias in this survey experiment. An exploratory subgroup analysis indicates that the effect of the intervention depends on context. The next step is to test this strategy in real‐world settings.

Racial Discrimination and Street‐Level Managers: Performance, Publicness, and Group Bias

“…Although this research was limited to one policy area in one country, we argue that there are several practical implications. Perhaps most obviously, we highlight the need for government agencies to strategize about how to proactively prevent racist behavior among their employees (Nagtegaal et al 2020). These efforts, our findings suggest, need to start at the top, but the findings here go further than just sounding the alarm—they also provide some guidance to policy makers and practitioners seeking to reduce racial discrimination.…”

“…In response, this article examines three potential moderators of racial discrimination: citizen performance, organizational publicness, and group bias. By studying whether these factors exacerbate or mitigate racial discrimination, this article improves our understanding of street‐level organizations and identifies practical steps organizations can take to reduce biased behavior (Nagtegaal et al 2020).…”

Sector Bias and the Credibility of Performance Information: An Experimental Study of Elder Care Provision

“…Past studies that examined objective performance information and its effect on citizens' perceptions have generally provided context‐specific data, such as student pass/fail rates, surgical complication rates, delivery rates, and transit times (Baekgaard and Serritzlew 2016; Marvel 2015). Such information can be difficult to evaluate unless individuals are given data for comparative purposes (Olsen 2017b) since the different references levels of individuals can create ambiguity in terms of meaning (Holm 2017; Nagtegaal et al 2020; Rothbart et al 2019). This study seeks to provide less ambiguous data on performance: one that would preclude our respondents from wondering if the numeric indicators given should be viewed as acceptable, good, or excellent.…”

Your Money, Your Life, or Your Freedom? A Discrete‐Choice Experiment on Trade‐Offs During a Public Health Crisis

“…Our sampling procedure followed from empirical work that collects data among individuals registered to web panels that are dedicated to administering surveys online (e.g. Baekgaard and Serritzlew 2016; Christensen, Yamamoto, and Aoyagi 2020; Horvath, Banducci, and James 2020; Nagtegaal et al 2020; Olsen 2017; Vogel and Willems 2020). At the time of the survey, Italy had the second highest number of confirmed COVID‐19 cases and the highest number of deaths among European countries (WHO 2020).…”