Reference points, negativity bias and citizens’ performance evaluations: a replication and extension

Original

Reference points, negativity bias and citizens’ performance evaluations: a replication and extension

Richard M. Walker, Jiasheng Zhang, Bert George

Abstract

Experiments on how cognitive biases, such as social and historical reference points and negativity bias, shape citizens’ evaluations of government performance have produced mixed findings, which typically come from Western contexts and focus on single reference points. To address these gaps, we replicated (N = 3710) and extended (N = 2356) Olsen’s ‘Compared to what?’ to interactions between multiple social and historical reference points in Hong Kong. Very low baselines are found in the replication alongside trivial evidence for the importance of reference points in citizens’ performance evaluations and negativity bias. In the extension, we found that (1) when both social and historical reference points are presented to participants, they have stronger effects when negative information is provided and (2) the effects of combinations of historical and social reference points differ across policy domains. Though survey experiments can be noisy, the study demonstrates the value of replication to question the generalization of cognitive biases.