Decision-makers Processing of AI Algorithmic Advice: Automation Bias versus Selective Adherence

Artificial intelligence algorithms are increasingly adopted as decisional aides by public organisations, with the promise of overcoming biases of human decision-makers. At the same time, the use of algorithms may introduce new biases in the human-algorithm interaction. A key concern emerging from psychology studies regards human overreliance on algorithmic advice even in the face of warning signals and contradictory information from other sources (automation bias). A second concern regards decision-makers inclination to selectively adopt algorithmic advice when it matches their pre-existing beliefs and stereotypes (selective adherence). To date, we lack rigorous empirical evidence about the prevalence of these biases in a public sector context. We assess these via two pre-registered experimental studies (N=1,509), simulating the use of algorithmic advice in decisions pertaining to the employment of school teachers in the Netherlands. In study 1, we test automation bias by exploring participants adherence to a prediction of teachers performance, which contradicts additional evidence, while comparing between two types of predictions: algorithmic v. human-expert. We do not find evidence for automation bias. In study 2, we replicate these findings, and we also test selective adherence by manipulating the teachers ethnic background. We find a propensity for adherence when the advice predicts low performance for a teacher of a negatively stereotyped ethnic minority, with no significant differences between algorithmic and human advice. Overall, our findings of selective, biased adherence belie the promise of neutrality that has propelled algorithm use in the public sector

The emotive effect of government branding on citizens’ trust and its boundaries: Does the personal relevance of the policy issue matter?

Recent studies have demonstrated the potency of government branding to enhance citizens’ trust in government organizations and policies. Additionally, studies have pointed to the detrimental implications of this emotive effect, mainly its ability to compensate for organizations’ poor functioning, and accordingly to elicit undue trust. In light of these concerns, this study explores the boundaries of governments’ persuasion of citizens through branding and symbolic communications. Building on social psychology and marketing research, I hypothesize that citizens are less susceptible to persuasion by branding the more they perceive the policy issue as personally relevant. I test this expectation through a survey experiment, focused on air‐pollution policy in Israel, exploiting the natural variation in the perceived personal relevance between citizens residing in a polluted area in the country and others. The results indicate that even high levels of perceived personal relevance do not attenuate the effect of symbolic brand elements. This entails that the boundaries of persuasion and manipulation through branding are wider than expected.The politics and administration of institutional chang

Can Government Public Communications Elicit Undue Trust? Exploring the Interaction between Symbols and Substantive Information in Communications

Effective public communications have been proposed as a remedy for citizens’ distrust in government. Recent studies pointed to the emotional effect of symbolic elements, entangled in government public communications (e.g., logos, images, and celebrities). Still, they did not examine the interaction between these symbols and the substantive information in communications about bureaucracies’ performance and policies. Exploring this interaction is important for understanding the theoretical mechanisms underlying the effect of symbolic communication on citizens’ trust. Also, it is essential to assess symbols’ potency to unduly compensate for unfavorable or logically unpersuasive information, and enable public organizations to escape justified public criticism. Building on the social psychology Elaboration Likelihood Model, I theorize that symbols may increase citizens’ trust by conducing citizens to pay less attention to logically unpersuasive information, and thus offsetting its negative effect. I test this indirect mechanism via a large survey experiment, focusing on the Israeli Environment Protection Ministry. The experimental results support the research hypotheses and suggest that the effect of symbolic elements is stronger when communications include logically unpersuasive information. I discuss the implications of these findings for democratic responsiveness and accountability.The politics and administration of institutional chang

Political control or legitimacy deficit? Bureaucracies’ symbolic responses to bottom-up public pressures

Public administration research has thus far focused on the responses of bureaucracies to top-down pressures by elected politicians. By comparison, bureaucracies' responses to bottom-up public pressures, such as media coverage and social protest, and the micro-mechanisms that underlie the variation in their response, have received less attention. This study contributes to current literature by analysing the extent to which subjection to political control shapes the direct response of bureaucracies to bottom-up public pressures. Based on current literature, we explore two distinct micro-mechanisms: on the one hand, building, inter alia, on principal–agent theory, we would expect higher levels of political control to render bureaucracies more attentive to public pressures in order to preempt intervention by politicians who are reliant on public support (the principal–agent mechanism). Conversely, building on regulation theory, we would expect autonomous agencies to exhibit their attentiveness to salient public pressures in order to compensate for their precarious democratic legitimacy (the legitimacy-deficit mechanism). Empirically, we analyse the responses of a diverse set of 36 bureaucracies to the unprecedented social protests that took place in Israel during 2011. We focus on bureaucracies', including independent agencies', symbolic responses via advertising campaigns. Our analysis shows that higher levels of political control enhanced the inclination of bureaucracies to engage in symbolic interactions in response to the social protests, supporting our extended version of the principal–agent model.The politics and administration of institutional chang

Compensating for Poor Performance with Promotional Symbols: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

Extant literature regarding citizens’ responses to government public communications focuses on the roles of transparency and provision of information. Conversely, the effect of strategically designed symbols, which are integral to most public communications, received limited attention. Building on social psychology and marketing research, we theorize that familiar promotional symbols enhance citizens’ positive attitudes toward government through “evaluative conditioning,” yet this effect is conditioned by citizens’ experiences of actual government performance. We test these expectations via a survey experiment, which examines participants’ responses to a familiar promotional symbol of an Israeli state-owned electricity monopoly, given near-random variation in their experiences of prolonged power outages. We find that exposure to the well-known symbol enhances participants’ favorable attitudes toward the organization, and that this effect extends to those who recently experienced poor electricity services. The effect is significant in relation to participants’ trust in the organization, but not regarding their satisfaction and performance evaluation. These findings indicate that familiar promotional symbols can shape citizens’ attitudes, and compensate for the effect of poor performance, with regard to sufficiently ambiguous organizational aspects. We discuss the implications of these findings for current research on the effectiveness of transparency and performance information.The politics and administration of institutional chang

Enhancing democracy via bureaucracy: Senior managers' social identities and motivation for policy change

This article challenges the depiction of bureaucracy as a hurdle to democratic responsiveness. It proposes that senior civil servants' (SCSs) dual position as professionals and citizens may enhance government permeability to salient public agendas. Building on social identity theory, we argue that salient public agendas may arouse SCSs' social identification with in‐groups and thereby elicit their motivation for policy change within their task domain. Employing a mixed‐methods design, we analyze SCSs' social identification with the participants of the large‐scale social protests that took place in Israel during the summer of 2011, and their motivation for policy change in response to the protest agenda. We find that SCSs' social identification with the protesters enhanced their motivation for policy change. In addition, SCSs' perception of a conflict between responsiveness to the protest agenda and their organizational or professional identities shaped their preferences for policy solutions more than their motivation for policy change.The politics and administration of institutional chang

Large‐Scale Social Protest: A Business Risk and a Bureaucratic Opportunity

The public versus private nature of organizations influences their goals, processes, and employee values. However, existing studies have not analyzed whether and how the public nature of organizations shapes their responses to concrete social pressures. This article takes a first step toward addressing this gap by comparing the communication strategies of public organizations and businesses in response to large‐scale social protests. Specifically, we conceptualize, theorize, and empirically analyze the communication strategies of 100 organizations in response to large‐scale social protests that took place in Israel during 2011. We find that in response to these protests, public organizations tended to employ a “positive‐visibility” strategy, whereas businesses were inclined to keep a “low public profile.” We associate these different communication strategies with the relatively benign consequences of large‐scale social protests for public organizations compared with their high costs for businesses.The politics and administration of institutional chang

Human–AI interactions in public sector decision making: “Automation bias” and “selective adherence” to algorithmic advice

Artificial intelligence algorithms are increasingly adopted as decisional aides by public bodies, with the promise of overcoming biases of human decision-makers. At the same time, they may introduce new biases in the human–algorithm interaction. Drawing on psychology and public administration literatures, we investigate two key biases: overreliance on algorithmic advice even in the face of “warning signals” from other sources (automation bias), and selective adoption of algorithmic advice when this corresponds to stereotypes (selective adherence). We assess these via three experimental studies conducted in the Netherlands: In study 1 (N = 605), we test automation bias by exploring participants’ adherence to an algorithmic prediction compared to an equivalent human-expert prediction. We do not find evidence for automation bias. In study 2 (N = 904), we replicate these findings, and also test selective adherence. We find a stronger propensity for adherence when the advice is aligned with group stereotypes, with no significant differences between algorithmic and human-expert advice. In study 3 (N = 1,345), we replicate our design with a sample of civil servants. This study was conducted shortly after a major scandal involving public authorities’ reliance on an algorithm with discriminatory outcomes (the “childcare benefits scandal”). The scandal is itself illustrative of our theory and patterns diagnosed empirically in our experiment, yet in our study 3, while supporting our prior findings as to automation bias, we do not find patterns of selective adherence. We suggest this is driven by bureaucrats’ enhanced awareness of discrimination and algorithmic biases in the aftermath of the scandal. We discuss the implications of our findings for public sector decision making in the age of automation. Overall, our study speaks to potential negative effects of automation of the administrative state for already vulnerable and disadvantaged citizens

Independent agencies, credible policies? The role of prior beliefs in shaping stakeholder perceptions of credibility in a contested environment

Agency independence is understood to instil credibility in regulatory policy. This is a core tenet of regulation theory, foundational to the EU regulatory state’s own origin story. We put the assumption to rigorous testing, in addition to expanding on it theoretically. We expect that stakeholder perceptions of credibility depend not only on agencies’ institutional insulation, but also on whether regulatory outcomes are congruent with stakeholders’ prior beliefs and preferences. Focusing on EU food safety regulation and the European Food Safety Authority, we test, observationally and experimentally, whether the credibility of agency scientific outputs is enhanced when stakeholders perceive the agency as more independent. Some support for the theorised link is present observationally, yet we do not find consistent and reliable experimental causal evidence for the purported relationship. We further find that the credibility of agency outputs is greatly influenced by stakeholders’ prior positions on the issue, pointing at persistent contestation. The study advances our understanding of the factors that shape credibility perceptions, supplementing institutional accounts with individual-level considerations, namely the role of priors. Our study indicates independence is a necessary but partial solution in that it can enhance stakeholder perceptions of credibility but does not compensate for the negative effect of priors.</p