Measuring the Effectiveness of Cognitive Biases on Climate-Oriented Decision Making: A Novel Consideration for Policy Ideation and Enforcement

Public policies are an imperative population intervention to guide human decision-making towards the intended goal in order to achieve both the public good and improvements in society. However, recent years have witnessed increased noncompliance to public policies and their general failures to influence target population’s decision-making in dire areas of issues. One primary example is climate policy. While traditional methods of policy framing are currently met with nonoptimal population responses, incorporating common cognitive biasing strategies may provide a solution. Thus, this research study aims to investigate the impact of cognitive bias on responses towards climate policy. The study compared the responses of two independent groups to a survey that differed in the statement tone: one survey was neutral, while the other incorporated various forms of cognitive bias related to climate policy. The study recruited 149 participants who were randomly assigned to either the neutral or pro-climate conditioned survey. Each question in the pro-climate conditioned survey contains framing in the form of both pro-climate language and specific cognitive biases such as base rates, temporal construal, emotional arousal, etc. The results, which are based on the difference in participant responses between the neutral and pro-climate survey, showed that the participants in the pro-climate condition had significantly different responses towards climate policy compared to those in the neutral condition. Namely, questions 16, 23, 26, and 37 showed statistically significant differences between the two conditions. While questions 16 and 26 are general priming questions where the only difference between the two conditions is the pro-climate language, questions 23 and 37 tested the effect and cumulative priming influence of specific cognitive biases. All four questions’ results’ implications are then thoroughly discussed, along with a more general discussion of the overall priming influence of the pro-climate survey. Overall, these findings indicate that the inclusion of cognitive bias in survey questions can prime individuals and influence their identification and implementation of climate-based policy initiatives. These results highlight the importance of understanding how cognitive biases can affect responses to surveys and, in turn, influence policy decisions. Along with discussions of the qualitative implications of this study’s quantitative results, potential limitations associated with this study’s methods, and broader conclusions of this study’s practical application are discussed.