Challenges for sustainability: misperceptions and misleading advice

Abstract

To ensure sustainable development, governments depend on informed decision-makers including the electorates. Previous studies show evidence of widespread and systematic misperceptions, voter ignorance, and reliance on inappropriate cognitive heuristics. The wait and see heuristic is one such trusted heuristic that is used repeatedly and with minimal effort. When applied to the management of dynamically complex renewable resources, it leads to overinvestment and resource depletion. On the optimistic side, a laboratory experiment finds that proactive expert advice counteracts the wait and see heuristic and contributes to sustainability. However, when expert advice is challenged by misleading advice that supports the wait and see heuristic, most of the positive effect of the expert advice disappears. The experiment generalizes to a large number of sustainability problems. Different from fake news that can be corrected by simple facts, misperceptions and misleading advice call for extraordinary information policies and deliberative democracy.