Selective Attention and the Architecture of Belief: Instability and Multimodality in Public Decision-Making

• In Event: Causal Inference in Public Management

Abstract

Recent advances in behavioral public administration reveal systematic deviations from rational decision-making among citizens, policymakers, and government employees, with significant implications for public management and policy design (e.g., Bellé et al., 2018; Grimmelikhuijsen et al., 2017). Drawing on insights from cognitive science (e.g., Bordalo et al., 2023), this study proposes and experimentally tests a unifying framework that reinterprets these decision-making anomalies—traditionally attributed to heuristics—as emergent properties of a core cognitive mechanism: selective attention.

The framework theorizes two key characteristics of belief formation: (i) instability, whereby beliefs overreact or underreact to seemingly irrelevant factors such as the framing of equivalent information; and (ii) multi-modality, whereby beliefs cluster around anchoring points. Two predictions follow: First, instability results from selective bottom-up attention, in which individuals involuntarily focus on salient stimuli while overlooking non-salient but relevant information. Second, multi-modality arises from random variation or divergent past experiences that shape individual decision-makers.

These predictions are tested in two pre-registered experiments with public workers. The findings contribute to a unified theory of cognitive biases by linking instability and multi-modality in belief formation to the mechanism of selective attention. This framework reconciles key discrepancies and advances the understanding of decision-making in behavioral public administration and beyond.

References

Bellé, Nicola, Paola Cantarelli, and Paolo Belardinelli. "Prospect theory goes public: Experimental evidence on cognitive biases in public policy and management decisions." Public Administration Review 78, no. 6 (2018): 828-840.

Bordalo, Pedro, John J. Conlon, Nicola Gennaioli, Spencer Yongwook Kwon, and Andrei Shleifer. How people use statistics. No. w31631. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2023.

Grimmelikhuijsen, Stephan, Sebastian Jilke, Asmus Leth Olsen, and Lars Tummers. "Behavioral public administration: Combining insights from public administration and psychology." Public Administration Review 77, no. 1 (2017): 45-56.

Author

• Nicola Belle, Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies
  Presenting Author