For decades, policy theories have used the phrase ‘bounded rationality’ to describe the limits to our cognitive power: as human beings, policymakers do not have the time, resources or cognitive capacity to consider all information, all possibilities, all solutions, or anticipate all the consequences of their actions (Simon, 1976; Cairney and Heikkila, 2014). People are ‘cognitive misers’ (Kam, 2005), using informational shortcuts and heuristics to gather just enough information to make decisions.

More recently, policy scholars have drawn heavily from psychology to understand how emotions act as informational shortcuts, and coexist with cognition in individual and group thinking. Direct reference points from psychology include:

1. Haidt’s (2001, p 818; 2007, 2012) distinction between ‘intuitive system’ and ‘reasoning system’. People grasp moral truths as a form of perception, not reflection, and ‘moral reasoning is usually an ex post facto process used to influence the intuitions (and hence judgements) of other people’; one has an instant gut response to certain issues and ‘when faced with a social demand for a verbal justification, one becomes a lawyer trying to build a case rather than a judge searching for the truth’ (Haidt, 2001, p 814). 2. Kahneman’s (2012, p 20) thinking ‘fast and slow’: ‘System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations … often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice and concentration’.

For example, Lewis (2013, p 4, p 7) argues that ‘fast’ thinking is ‘typically where the action is’ because people tend to conserve ‘attention and cognitive processing capabilities for the few activities we currently view as most essential’ and rely on ‘autopilot’ whenever emotions are heightened. He describes a list of cognitive shortcuts, derived from psychology studies, that are now a key feature of policy scholarship, including:

the ‘availability heuristic’, when people relate the size, frequency or probability of a problem to how easy it is to remember or imagine;

the ‘representativeness heuristic’, when people overestimate the probability of vivid events;

‘prospect theory’, when ‘losses tend to pain us more than gains please us’;

‘framing effects’ based on emotional and moral judgements over well thought out preferences;

‘confirmation bias’, where material that corroborates what we already believe is given disproportionate credence;

‘optimism bias’, or unrealistic expectations about our aims working out well when we commit to them;

‘status quo bias’;

a tendency to use exemplars of social groups to represent general experience; and,

a ‘need for coherence’ to establish gestalt like patterns and causal relationships when they may not exist (2013, p 7).

There is always more to learn from contemporary psychological studies which ‘zoom in’ to key aspects such as individual and organisational psychology. For example, processing fluency (built on studies of the availability heuristic) suggests that individuals’ decisions are influenced by their familiarity with things; and with the ease in which they process information (Alter and Oppenheimer, 2009). They may pay more attention to an issue or evidence if they already possess some knowledge of it and find it relatively easy to understand or recall (Alter and Oppenheimer, 2009, p 220). Other studies focus primarily on emotional heuristics (Brader, 2011; Haste, 2012), analyse the emotional connection of individuals to the groups to which they identify (Menges and Kilduff, 2015), or otherwise recognise that emotion and cognition are part of the same internal mental process (Storbeck and Clore, 2007).

Organisational psychology highlights the importance of ‘social context’ and ‘group processes’, which often inhibit an organisation’s ability to ‘liberate’ the knowledge provided by each person and broaden the ‘information considered before making a decision’ (Larrick, 2016). Obstacles include a tendency in established groups to share, repeat, and trust ‘commonly held’ rather than new information (‘common knowledge bias’), and to minimise disagreement by limiting the diversity of information, which disadvantages outsiders or ‘people in low positions of power who withhold their private doubts because they fear a high social cost’ (2016, p 448).

Empirical studies are rarely conducted on policymakers directly (Kwiatkowski, 2016), but the implications can be profound. In particular, a policymaker may feel antagonism towards a person giving what they perceive to be dubious evidence without realising that is because they are ‘carrying’ a group emotion with them (Menges and Kilduff, 2015). One’s lack of awareness of the emotion does not preclude action (Schein, 1969). For example, Van Stekelenburg and Klandermans (2013) point to the need for collective social identification, a sense of collective self-efficacy and the presence of emotion as predictors of coordinated political action (such as protest). Kam (2005) found that actors draw more from cues related to their allies (such as a shared political party) than specific political issues. Houghton (2008) points to many ‘errors’–from ‘decision making on impulse’ to ‘groupthink’–that the Bush administration made when going to war in Iraq, and the Chilcot Inquiry (2016) makes similar points about the UK Government under Blair. More generally, Bion (1961) contrasts the positive idea of a work group, or group of individuals able to have a good contact with reality and deal with the anxiety engendered by complex tasks or difficult relationships, with a maladaptive group that seems to be in the thrall of unspoken and unconscious ‘basic assumptions’ and fairly closed to logical arguments.

The added value of policy studies is to show how such individual and group behaviour plays out in complex policymaking environments, containing:

1. A large number of influential actors spread across fragmented and multi-level political systems. 2. Institutions, as the rules and norms that actors use as shortcuts to action. 3. The networks between policy makers and influencers, often built on regular exchanges of information, trust, and a shared outlook. 4. A tendency for well-established beliefs to monopolise the ways in which actors understand policy problems. 5. The routine or unanticipated events to which policymakers pay attention. 6. The socioeconomic context, to which policymakers need to respond, even if most policy conditions (such as demographic and economic change) are difficult to fully understand or remain out of their control (Cairney and Heikkila, 2014; Cairney and Weible, 2017).

In other words, modern policy theories take us beyond simple notions of linear policymaking via a series of stages in a policy cycle, in which: a small elite group of policymakers are in control of the policy process; they are aided by expert policy analysts to make and legitimise choices; skilful public servants carry them out; and, policy analysts assess the results using evidence (Cairney, 2015; 2016). Instead, there are many powerful but boundedly rational actors in play. Individual policymakers, or a collection of elite policymakers at the ‘macropolitical’ level, can only ‘serial process’, or focus on one issue at a time; governments as a whole can ‘parallel process’ because there are many policymakers spread across many organisations working on different issues (Baumgartner and Jones, 1993, p 7). In such a complex system, where no single policymaker is in charge, and policy outcomes seem to emerge without singular central direction: ‘the most relevant evidence adopters will be operating at multiple levels of government, stages will appear to interact in a disorderly way, and policy will be made as it is carried out, by bodies that may not report directly to central government’ (Cairney, 2016, p 41; Cairney, 2012b).

Early post-war studies focused on the goal-oriented strategies of key actors in that context (Jones, 2017). Simon (1957; 1976, p 28) identified policymakers’ ‘rules of thumb’ to identify the issues most important to them and gather the most relevant information to produce ‘good enough’ decisions. For Lindblom (1959, p 88; 1964, p 157) ‘incrementalism’ described key rules to deal with bounded rationality: identify realistic policy aims that do not divert radically from the status quo, limit analysis to those options, and combine analysis with strategies such as trial-and-error. Their enduring insight is that bounded rationality is an ever-present constraint on policymakers, who are ‘under continual pressure to reach decisions’ (Botterill and Hindmoor, 2012, p 369). Although information technologies have improved, they do not preclude the need to make judgements quickly about ‘what is feasible’ in the face of limits to ‘brain power, time and financial inputs’ (2012, p 369).

Modern theories show that ‘incremental’ change may result less from strategic trial and error and more from unequal power; the exercise of power to entrench fast choices. Policymakers respond to bounded rationality by relying on quick gut-level, instinctual, emotional, and moral choices. Put most strongly, ‘Reason is emotion’s slave and exists to rationalize experience’ (Bion, 1970) when unconscious processes, out of awareness, are present (Arnaud, 2012). ‘Hot cognition’ (Lodge and Taber, 2005, p 456) describes actors’ feelings about things they have thought about in the past – ‘political leaders, groups, issues, symbols, and ideas’ – which come ‘automatically and inescapably to mind’ and ‘become information’. If so, people become ‘biased reasoners … even when they are motivated to be impartial’. Passion and intuition helps explain why policymakers quickly assign praise and blame to ‘target populations’ and their beliefs often seem impervious to change (Schneider et al., 2014; Lewis, 2013, p 13; Fiske 2011). Policy actors may deal collectively with bounded rationality by telling simple stories to help ‘process information, communicate, and reason’ (McBeth et al., 2014) and an ‘evidence-gathering’ process may serve to reinforce collective identity or what people already believe (Lewis, 2013, p 13–15; Stone, 1989). Or, powerful ‘advocacy coalitions’ can obstruct policy change for decades (Jenkins-Smith et al. 2014). They consist of actors who enter politics to turn their beliefs into policy, form coalitions with people who share their beliefs, romanticise their own cause and demonise their opponents (Sabatier et al., 1987, p 451; Buckingham, 2011), and interpret the same evidence in wildly different ways (Weible, 2007, p 99).

However, bounded rationality can also prompt major policy change. Individuals typically pay attention to one policy problem and a particular way to frame it (the ‘policy image’) at a time. They often take certain ways of thinking for granted for long periods, often because they are not paying attention (Baumgartner and Jones, 1993, p 7; Baumgartner, 2017; Cairney, 2012a, p 230; Hall, 1993). Yet, policy problems are ambiguous, people can entertain multiple policy images (Zahariadis, 2014), and a small change in policy conditions, or injection of new information, can produce a major shift of attention to a policy problem or different image (Baumgartner et al., 2014). Bounded rationality plus ambiguity produces the potential for ‘macro-political’ attention to lurch dramatically and create the conditions for change (True et al., 2007, pp 158–159). During such ‘windows of opportunity’, actors can exploit widespread but temporary surges of attention to a problem to promote their favoured solution (Kingdon, 1984; Zahariadis, 2014; Cairney and Jones, 2016).