Special session on Smart Heuristics for Civil Servants (SMAHCS)

Scope

The public administration faces complex and evolving challenges in today’s context. The increasing complexity of social, economic, and environmental issues demands innovative and flexible solutions. However, the adoption of these solutions is often hindered by bureaucratic procedures and slow decision-making, highlighting the need for a more agile and streamlined approach by public officials.

According to Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier (2011), individuals process evaluations and decisions following one of three modalities: logic, statistics, and heuristics. The first two, despite their sometimes overwhelming cognitive cost, seem to work best in ideal organizational contexts where managers are assumed to be well aware of all relevant choice alternatives and their precise consequences with associated probabilities.

Savage (1954) defines this idealized context as a "narrow world", in contrast to the "large world" of everyday public organizational contexts where individuals are just remotely aware of the constellation of possible (current and emerging) choice alternatives and their potential consequences and associated probabilities.

In this "broad world", the basic assumptions underlying logical, statistical, and optimizing reasoning are not respected, leading to the complexity of predictive models being simultaneously costly and inaccurate (Binmore, 2009). In such scenarios, Gerd Gigerenzer, through impactful and rigorous research since the 1990s, discovers a fundamentally inverted U-shaped function connecting the amount of processed information and the accuracy of evaluation.

In these broad scenarios, where cognitive resources are limited, Gigerenzer’s research group at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition identifies and validates a repertoire of heuristics (i.e., the adaptive toolbox) capable of addressing computationally intractable problems in a parsimonious and effective manner.

Heuristics, freed from the connotation of processes with only distorting and dysfunctional effects, are defined as strategies that ignore part of the available information to process decisions faster, more frugally, and/or more accurately than complex models. In essence, a heuristic aims to achieve the best decisional result with the minimum effort of attention and cognitive resources. In this sense, we can speak of Smart Heuristics and their potential to improve decision-making and operational processes, even in the context of public administration.

In numerous contexts, from finance to medicine, research has already identified and controlled the effectiveness of Smart Heuristics in promoting both agility and accuracy in decisions and performance. As we have seen, current challenges of innovation and reform require a more streamlined and dynamic public administration. Indeed, Smart Heuristics emerge as promising tools to enhance the effectiveness of public administration. These adaptive and experience-based rules of thumb can reduce decisional complexity, enabling quicker responses to complex problems. For example, using heuristics to manage financial resources can lead to better fund allocation, optimizing results without compromising the quality of public services. Furthermore, Smart Heuristics could facilitate citizen participation and transparency by involving citizens in the decision-making process. Integrating citizen feedback through experience-based heuristics can improve the legitimacy of decisions and strengthen the relationship between public administration and society. Moreover, in an era where emerging technologies are transforming the landscape, smart heuristics can facilitate the adoption of technological innovations. Leveraging heuristics to guide the implementation of artificial intelligence and other technologies can make public administration more efficient and effective.

For these reasons, it appears crucial to concentrate research efforts on the development of Smart Heuristics to equip public officials to become agents of positive change, enabling public administration to address challenges more dynamically and respond to the evolving needs of society with greater agility and effectiveness. Building on innovative research initiatives, community outreach programs, and researcher engagement in public policy and decision-making, SMAHCS actively engages with diverse stakeholders to use smart heuristics to address real-world challenges.

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Topics

• Smart heuristics for individuals, teams, and organizations: Where do we stand?
• Inherently interdisciplinary research: Behavioral economics for policy.
• Public policy as a purview: A framework for policymakers and practitioners.
• Integrate the patchwork of heuristics scattered across various areas of organizational studies.
• Descriptive and prescriptive frameworks: From adaptive toolbox to ecological rationality.
• Heuristics and rational strategies such as expected utility maximization.
• Uncertainty-prone environments as primary conditions for firms and leaders to use heuristics.
• Language as cognitive science for establishing relationships between civil servants and citizens.
• Epicurus’s view against the utilitarian approach that welfare economics takes for granted.
• Inadequacy of the Bayesian approach to large worlds: Binmore’s muddled strategies.
• Rationality and the public policy: Decision-making and the ecological rationality of heuristics.
• Toolkits for civil servants: Implications for research, policy, and practice.
• Solving complex problems: Civil service policy development.
• Meeting current and future policy challenges in behavioral bureaucracy.
• Behavioural and cognitive economics: Choice architecture, nudging, and normative actions.
• Civil servants and organizations in urban development processes: The case of smart cities.
• Creating citizens empowerment: Participatory design, social design, and social innovation.
• Enabling the design of motivational strategies: Mapping out intrinsic and extrinsic values.
• Accounting for private market stakeholders, governance stakeholders and politics: Extrinsic and intrinsic values.

SMAHCS 2025 welcomes empirical, experimental, theoretical, epistemological, and methodological papers, among other insightful works, addressing the above or related questions from various fields and standpoints. Specifically, we invite researchers and scholars to submit papers using simple task-specific decision strategies and, more generally, an ‘adaptive toolbox’ of ecologically rational heuristics that civil servants and other decision-makers can apply to produce more accurate contingency estimates. Applied papers should discuss implications for research, policy, and practice, and lessons learned in the broader social and cognitive science area so that practitioners, academicians, and civil servants can benefit from the emerging knowledge gained. Strictly empirical, computational, and lab or field experimental studies are also welcome, especially those investigating judgments under uncertainty during the contingency estimation process. Finally, we encourage papers on quantitative and qualitative methods addressing interdisciplinary research approaches. Methodological contributions should be based on empirical evidence and provide clear guidance for researchers who wish to use a particular research