Understanding and increasing policymakers’ sensitivity to program impact

Policymakers routinely make high-stakes funding decisions. Assessing the value of a program is difficult and may be affected by bounded rationality. We conducted experiments involving U.S. policymakers and the general public, in which participants were given the opportunity to assess the value of various policy programs. Our findings demonstrate that decision aids enhance the responsiveness of respondents to the impact of the programs. We designed and tested two portable decision aids—one that compares programs side-by-side and another that aggregates multiple features of impact into a single metric. The two decision aids increase the elasticity of assessments of program value with respect to impact by 0.20 on a base of 0.33 among policymakers and by 0.21 on a base of 0.21 among the general public. We provide evidence that the cognitive difficulty of translating impact-relevant information into policy decisions helps explain our findings. •We run an experiment with high-ranking policymakers in the U.S. government.•Decision aids enhance sensitivity to impact when policymakers evaluate programs.•Complexity appears to be an important barrier in policy decision-making.•We replicate and extend our findings in a general public sample.