Model of Human Fallibility

Traveling Behavioral Assumptions in Public Governance

Datos Bibliográficos

ID15748784
AutoresTrine Pallesen (0000-0001-8844-9336, Copenhagen Business School, autor de correspondencia), Kirstine Zinck Pedersen (0000-0002-7058-131X, Copenhagen Business School)
Año2023
Volumen6
Número2-3
Páginas119-130
Fecha de publicación2023-02-24
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaPerspectives on Public Management and Governance (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2398-4910 • E-ISSN: 2398-4929
EditorialOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/ppmgov/gvad001
OpenAlexW4362456921
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas22

Over the past decades, insights from behavioral sciences have gained traction as sources for designing public policy and for governing areas of collective concerns. It has become increasingly common to ascribe ‘flawed’ decision-making to systematic heuristics and cognitive biases of citizens and experts. This popular behavioral approach to public organizing is anchored in a very particular model of human behavior, namely what we label homo fallibilis or the model human fallibility. This model grew out of a critique of neoclassical economics’ homo economicus but ended as a new recipe for predicting and regulating human behavior. To conceptualize the model of human fallibility and to understand its ability to travel intellectually and empirically, we trace it historically to Simon’s bounded rationality, over Tversky and Kahneman’s systematic biases and to recent nudge literature. Next, we illustrate how and by what means the model travels into different areas of public service provision in strikingly similar ways. We finally suggest that the model of human fallibility risks giving way to an “anti-human stance” that promotes a particular type of behavioral design in ever more areas of public governance at the expense of alternative ways of governing that enhance discretion, expertise, training, and habituation

Behavioral economics · Bounded rationality · Corporate governance · Economics · Heuristics · Homo economicus · Irrationality · Management · Microeconomics · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Public choice · Rationality · Sociology · Computer Science · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics · Economic Theory and Institutions · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies · Psychology · Law