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.