Cognitive biases and decision-making at
the government
level
COVID-19 is a prototype of scenarios that accurately portrays a
sequential emergence of different cognitive biases and related defects
in decision-making that at least in part have played a role in the
widespread of the disease. Initially, it was thought that COVID-19
resembles the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) pandemic in
merely involving the eastern part of Asia, and it is not spreading
through other regions. This is called anchoring bias, which means to
judge based on the first received information without considering the
undergoing alterations through the time period. Subsequently, leaders
started to believe this small enemy can attack each and every country in
the world. However, this time, the Western countries from Italy to the
US had the idea of not being much exposed to this pandemic, and they
ignored repetitive warning facts, plus being confident about their
strong infrastructural ability to cope with the pandemic. These two
ideas are called confirmation bias and overconfidence effect,
respectively. Next, the choice supportive bias came on the scene, being
represented in the UK choice of the herd-immunity strategy as the
primary approach to overcome the pandemic and their ignorance of all
other facts that can potentially defeat the efficiency of this strategy3,4.
Other cognitive biases involved in the context of declining people’s
trust of the governments during the COVID-19 pandemic include the
Dunning-Kruger effect, selective perception bias, and optimism bias. The
Dunning-Kruger effect occurs when a person overestimates his knowledge
about a certain topic, despite the limited available data in that area.
The idea of injecting disinfectants to patients with COVID-19 and the
consideration of COVID-19 as a cold or flu are a few examples of this
bias committed by some heads of government.
The idea of thinking of COVID-19 as flu might also implicate the
selective perception bias, by which messages and actions are usually
perceived according to the one’s frame of reference, and any other
contradictive messages and facts are not considered at all. Finally,
attempts of some governments to promote the use of unapproved drugs as
miracles in the treatment of COVID-19 resulted in a bias that is called
Ostrich bias or Optimism bias 4,5.
The mentioned cognitive biases are only those which could be detected in
the literature. There are, of course, other cognitive biases that
remained elusive due to the lack of public announcements, particularly
in countries other than the US and European countries.