A great deal of theoretical work explores the possibility that algorithms may be biased in one or another respect. But for purposes of law and policy, some of the most important empirical research finds exactly the opposite. In the context of bail decisions, an algorithm designed to predict flight risk does much better than human judges, in large part because the latter place an excessive emphasis on the current offense. Current Offense Bias, as we might call it, is best seen as a cousin of “availability bias,” a well-known source of mistaken probability judgments. The broader lesson is that well-designed algorithms should be able to avoid cognitive biases of many kinds. Existing research on bail decisions also casts a new light on how to think about the risk that algorithms will discriminate on the basis of race (or other factors). Algorithms can easily be designed so as to avoid taking account of race (or other factors). They can also be constrained so as to produce whatever kind of racial balance is sought, and thus to reveal tradeoffs among various social values.

Are there systematic differences between the behaviour of politicians – such as ministers, members of parliament or elected municipal council members – and that of ‘the rest of us’? Are politicians in a ‘league of their own’ in terms of how they take decisions and make judgements? In the existing literature, there is no overriding consensus or clear majority of findings on these questions. We add to this literature by leveraging results from an experiment with two samples: (1) Dutch locally elected politicians (n = 211) and (2) students (n = 260). The experiment examined whether these two groups displayed biases related to the representativeness heuristic and the availability heuristic – two so-called general purpose heuristics – and whether they displayed the reflection effect. Our findings demonstrate that politicians’ judgements and decisions are largely similar to those of the rest of us, indicating that there is little evidence of an elite-public gap in this respect. Under specific circumstances, however, politicians do differ in their judgement and decision making. These differences may have consequences for the functioning of representative democracy and for policy making. It is especially noteworthy that in this study political experience or expertise did not reduce decision-making biases.