정책실무자들의 판단과 의사결정: 휴리스틱스와 바이어스(heuristics and biases)

초록

It has long been recognized that irrational parts would exist in human decision making process. However, it is unclear to the extent that irrational decisions are made. This study focused on examining bureaucrats' decision making process in the public sector by empirically analyzing whether heuristics and biases can negatively affect their judgment and decision making. ‘Representativeness heuristics’, ‘availability heuristics’, ‘anchoring and adjustment heuristics’, introduced by Kahneman and Tversky(1974, 1973), were adopted to measure systematic biases. For representativeness heuristics, this study found that bureaucrats' judgments were influenced by the insensitivity to prior probability and sample size, the misconception of chance, the insensitivity to predictability, and the misconception of the regression toward the mean. For availability heuristics, the bureaucrats assessed the frequency of a class or the probability of an event by the ease with which instances or occurrences can be brought to mind. For anchoring and adjustment heuristics, while the probability of conjunctive events was over-estimated, the probability of disjunctive events was under-estimated. These results indicate that systemic biases exist in bureaucrats' decision making process. This study, therefore, implies that training programs and educations are needed to improve rationality in bureaucrats' judgment and decision making.

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