Join the USC Schaeffer Institute's Behavioral Science & Policy Initiative and Social Psychology for a seminar with Craig Fox, the Harold Williams Chair and Professor of Management at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

 Citizens are frequently asked to express their preferences concerning public policies through public opinion polls, voter ballot initiatives, and decisions they make as elected representatives. Rational public policy decisions require consideration of cost-effectiveness of programs, alternative spending priorities, and budget constraints. Unfortunately, they generally have limited numeracy concerning the enormous scopes and dollar amounts of government programs, little awareness of alternative policy spending options, and poor understanding of government budgets and financing. Thus, we argue that citizens’ government spending preferences are generally myopic, relatively insensitive to prices in a noncomparative context, failing to take into account higher priority spending alternatives even when prompted to do so, and fail to adequately consider budget constraints.

In three sets of preregistered studies we document these phenomena and explore how such effects are moderated by political ideology. Overall, our results are consistent with a process whereby people engage in preference construction using a form of the affect heuristic. These results suggest that pollsters, policy makers, and election officials should carefully consider contextual cues that may bias preference elicitation and use choice architecture that promotes broader bracketing when eliciting citizens' policy preferences.