Understanding evidence and behavioral responses: Future directions in evidence‐based policy‐making

Evidence can play a potentially powerful role in informing the policy-making process, be it to assess the effectiveness of policies or to facilitate policy change. However, systematic consideration of evidence in policy development can at times be secondary to political analysis or simply expediency. The field of research on evidence-based policy-making (EBPM) has evolved over the past decade and expanded its scope to include an increasing variety of types of factors considered as facilitators and constraints of evidence uptake (Oliver et al. 2014). These factors operate at different levels: individual (for example, skills and capacity), organization al (for example, infrastructure supporting evidence access and use), and relational (for example, interactions with academia). As of late, there is a growing interest in building on these factors that shape evidence use, but also to explore the behavioral responses to evidence (for example, how one understands, assimilates and uses evidence to draw a conclusion/make a judgment). With EBPM focusing on the nature and understanding of evidence, the context of evidence use, and the role of evidence in the policy process, the addition of the behavioural lens from psychology to this field of research is a promising development. This clear connection between EBPM and psychology has been signalled elsewhere (Rousseau and Gunia 2016), but the implications of this intersection need to be examined more substantively. The recent findings summarized below exemplify this recent shift, in that they deal with issues such as credibility perception, risk assessment, bias in interpretation, expertise and overconfidence. While these authors do not specifically frame their findings as engaging with EBPM, they ultimately have a bearing on how we understand EBPM and serve as a guide to new research directions in public administration.