Research report

Hindsight Bias and Trust in Government: Evidence from the United States

BP2-STS

Show more…
  • 2022

56

English We empirically assess whether hindsight bias has consequences on how citizens evaluate their political actors. Using an incentivized elicitation technique, we demonstrate that people systematically misremember their past policy preferences regarding how to best fight the Covid-19 pandemic. At the peak of the first wave in the United States, the average respondent mistakenly believes they supported significantly stricter restrictions at the onset of the first wave than they actually did. Exogenous variation in the extent of hindsight bias, induced through random assignment to survey structures, allows us to show that hindsight bias causally reduces trust in government.
Collections
Faculty
Faculté des sciences économiques et sociales et du management
Language
  • English
Classification
Economics
Series statement
  • Working Papers SES ; 526
License
License undefined
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/320070
Statistics

Document views: 145 File downloads:
  • WP_SES_526.pdf: 95