When multiple ways of deciding are laid out side-by-side, which does one favour? We conducted experiments in 12 countries ( = 3517 individuals; 13 languages; two Indigenous communities), with adults choosing among four decision strategies-personal intuition, private deliberation, friends' advice or crowd wisdom-when working through six everyday dilemmas. In every society, self-reliant decisions (intuition or deliberation) were most commonly preferred and considered the wisest. Expectations for fellow citizens, however, were mixed: advice from friends was expected about as often as self-reliant routes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDetermining appropriate mechanisms for transferring and translating research into policy has become a major concern for researchers (knowledge producers) and policymakers (knowledge users) worldwide. This has led to the emergence of a new function of brokering between researchers and policymakers, and a new type of agent called Knowledge Broker. Understanding these complex multi-agent interactions is critical for an efficient knowledge brokering practice during any given policymaking process.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Evidence-based policymaking is a paradigm aimed at increasing the use of evidence by actors involved in policymaking processes. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a heavy reliance on emerging evidence for policymaking during emergencies.
Objective: This study describes the focus and types of evidence in journal articles self-described as relevant to policymaking using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, identifying gaps in evidence and highlighting author stated perceived biases specifically in evidence-based policy making.
When evidence-based policymaking is so often mired in disagreement and controversy, how can we know if the process is meeting its stated goals? We develop a novel mathematical model to study disagreements about adequate knowledge utilization, like those regarding wild horse culling, shark drumlines and facemask policies during pandemics. We find that, when stakeholders disagree, it is frequently impossible to tell whether any party is at fault. We demonstrate the need for a distinctive kind of transparency in evidence-based policymaking, which we call transparency of reasoning.
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