Benchmark – Informing Policy

 Using both your textbook and at least one other peer-reviewed source, discuss the public choice theory or model. How does it relate to rivalness and excludability? 

Explaining Self-Interested Behavior of Public-Spirited Policy Makers 579

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 78, Iss. 4, pp. 579–592. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12825.

Raanan Sulitzeanu-Kenan is senior

lecturer in the Department of Political

Science and the School of Public Policy

at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,

where he heads the Cognition and Policy

Research Group. He also co-heads the

Proportionality in Policy project at the

Israeli Democracy Institute. His interests

include political psychology, behavioral

public administration, and empirical legal

studies, and his recent research examines

the electoral effects of judicial decisions.

E-mail : raanan.s-k@mail.huji.ac.il

Eyal Zamir is Augusto Levi Professor of

Commercial Law at the Hebrew University

of Jerusalem and a member of the Center

for Empirical Studies of Decision-Making

and the Law. His research interests include

economic and behavioral analysis of law,

empirical legal studies, contract law and

theory, and normative ethics and law.

E-mail : eyal.zamir@mail.huji.ac.il

Abstract: Public choice theory (PCT) has had a powerful influence on political science and, to a lesser extent, public
administration. Based on the premise that public officials are rational maximizers of their own utility, PCT has a
quite successful record of correctly predicting governmental decisions and policies. This success is puzzling in light of
behavioral findings showing that officials do not necessarily seek to maximize their own utility. Drawing on recent
advances in behavioral ethics, this article offers a new behavioral foundation for PCT ’ s predictions by delineating
the psychological processes that lead well-intentioned people to violate moral and social norms. It reviews the relevant
findings of behavioral ethics, analyzes their theoretical and policy implications for officials ’ decision making, and sets
an agenda for future research.

Evidence for Practice
• Ethical behavior is driven both by self-interest and by norms. Thus, officeholders tend to breach norms only

to the extent that they can maintain their self-image as honest people.
• Public officeholders may act in self-interested ways because of automatic and unconscious motivations rather

than deliberate and conscious calculations.
• The clearer it is to an officeholder that his or her interests diverge from those of the public at large, the less

likely he or she is to give precedence to the former.
• Officeholders can recollect decisions they took that clearly promoted the public interest more easily than

their self-interested decisions.

Eyal Zamir
Raanan Sulitzeanu-Kenan

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Explaining Self-Interested Behavior of Public-Spirited
Policy Makers

A major development in political science and, to a lesser extent, in public administration research during the second half of the
twentieth century was the rise of public choice
theory (PCT). PCT introduced standard economic
assumptions about human behavior into analyses of
political and administrative processes (Ostrom and
Ostrom 1971 ; Tullock, Seldon, and Brady 2002 ). In
line with the assumptions of rational choice theory,
PCT assumes that public officials, both elected and
unelected, are rational maximizers of their utility.
Economic rationality consists of both cognitive and
motivational components. Cognitive rationality
presupposes that people ’ s preferences and decision-
making strategies comply with certain formal
requirements, such as completeness and transitivity
of preferences; consideration of all available, relevant
information; and exclusion of irrelevant information.
Motivational rationality adds to that the premise that
people are self-interested. That is, when choosing
among alternatives, they always choose the one that
is expected to yield the greatest benefit to them. This
premise rules out both true altruism and commitment
to nonselfish ideals (Green and Shapiro 1996 , 18).

In recent decades, both sets of assumptions have been
challenged by a growing body of experimental and
observational studies by psychologists, economists,
and political scientists that cast doubt on the premise
of cognitive rationality by showing that people ’ s
preferences and choices often fail to meet requirements
such as dominance, transitivity, and invariance. The
heuristics-and-biases literature has demonstrated that
people ’ s choices deviate from these assumptions in
systematic and predictable ways (Baron 2008 ; Keren
and Wu 2015 ). Based on this literature, it has been
argued that many suboptimal governmental decisions
are attributable not to the economic rationality of
public officials but to their bounded rationality (Lucas
and Tasic 2015 ; Rachliski and Farina 2002 ; Simon
1972 ). Other studies have called into question the
premise of motivational rationality by pointing to
the role of other motivations, such as envy, altruism,
and concerns about fairness and reciprocity (for an
overview, see Gächter 2014 ). Accordingly, many
suggestions have been made to qualify, supplement,
and improve PCT by introducing more nuanced
assumptions about policy makers ’ motivation and
cognitive ability (e.g., Jones 2001 ; Ostrom 1998 ).

Research Article

580 Public Administration Review • July | August 2018

Notwithstanding these and other compelling critiques, PCT has often
provided quite accurate predictions of governmental policy choices.
Many governmental decisions appear to systematically cater to the
interests of officeholders, or to those of powerful interest groups,
rather than the interests of the general public (e.g., Bartels 2008 ;
Gilens and Page 2014 ; Jacobs and Page 2005 ; Schlozman, Verba, and
Brady 2012 ). In line with PCT, such decisions advance the interests
of those who can directly and indirectly benefit (or harm) public
officials by providing (or withholding) campaign finance for future
reelection, facilitate (or block) access to privately controlled media,
offer (or deny) future jobs in the private sector, and the like.

In this article, we seek to bridge the gap between PCT ’ s predictive
power and its questionable behavioral assumptions by integrating
insights from the recent and growing study of behavioral ethics
(BE) into the theory of political and administrative behavior.
Broadly speaking, BE identifies the circumstantial, personal, and
environmental conditions that lead ordinary people—through
automatic, intuitive, and mostly unconscious psychological
processes—to violate moral and social norms (for overviews, see
Bazerman and Tenbrunsel 2011 ; Feldman 2014 ). These insights
can explain when and how well-intentioned officials might make
decisions that advance their own interests and those of rent seekers
rather than the public interest. The fact that the meaning and
implications of the norm that government authorities should
pursue the public good are often ambiguous renders such violations
particularly likely. BE studies lend support to the argument that
public officials often advance their personal interests—but without
necessarily portraying them as cynical. Thus, we argue that in many
instances, the insights of BE provide a sounder behavioral footing
for PCT ’ s predictions.

Our thesis is associated with social psychology and the emerging
field of behavioral public administration (Grimmelikhuijsen et al.
2017 ). Yet, unlike studies that focus on citizens ’ decision making
(e.g., Caplan 2001 ; for an overview, see Schnellenbach and Schubert
2015 , 397–404), here we discuss governmental decision making.
Our analysis is part of behavioral economics broadly conceived.
However, while most behavioral analyses of governmental decision
making have hitherto focused on cognitive rationality (drawing on
the heuristics-and-biases literature), we focus on BE—in particular,
conflicts between self-interest and moral and social norms (we are
unaware of previous integration of the BE literature into political
psychology or behavioral public administration). Most significantly,
whereas psychological insights are usually used to challenge and
qualify PCT, our thesis aims to reinforce PCT ’ s predictions.

In addition to strengthening the behavioral foundation of PCT ’ s
predictions, our theory offers testable hypotheses and policy
implications that sometimes diverge from those offered by standard
PCT or the heuristics-and-biases literature. For example, according
to standard PCT, the more blatant a public official ’ s conflict of
interest, the greater the danger that he or she will put his or her own
interests before the general good. In contrast, BE predicts that when
a conflict of interest is clear and unmistakable, officials are more
likely to recognize and control their automatic tendency to advance
their own interests. Thus, it is the less obvious cases of conflict
of interest that pose a greater threat to a well-functioning public
administration.

Importantly, we do not argue that public officials are always well
intentioned, that governmental failures are never attributable to
cognitive biases, or that PCT ’ s predictions are always correct.
Clearly, the picture is more complex: officials sometimes deliberately
pursue their own interests at the expense of the public good, policy
makers sometimes fall prey to cognitive biases, and governmental
decisions sometimes do effectively promote the general good.
Our point is that much of the success of PCT in predicting
governmental decisions is attributable not to decision makers
deliberately maximizing their own utility but rather to automatic
and mostly unconscious psychological processes that increase the
prevalence of self-interested behavior—often beyond the awareness
and recollection of the acting public agents. This may account
for the existing disjunction between findings that suggest that
public officials possess a great deal of prosocial motivation and the
considerable success of PCT in predicting policy outcomes.

The remainder of this article consists of four sections. The following
section offers an overview of public choice theory and its critique
and concludes with a puzzle: given the doubtful behavioral
assumptions of PCT, why are its predictions often correct? To
answer this question, the next section surveys the relevant findings
and insights of BE and argues that they can provide a sounder
behavioral basis for PCT ’ s predictions. The following sections then
analyze the theoretical and policy implications of our thesis and
suggest directions for further research.

Public Choice Theory and Its Critique
This section succinctly reviews the fundamental elements of PCT
that are relevant to our thesis. This review is followed by a critique
of PCT and concludes with the main puzzle that motivates this
article: given its doubtful behavioral assumptions, why are the
predictions of PCT often correct?

Public Choice Theory: General
In keeping with standard economic analysis, PCT assumes that
political and administrative officials rationally maximize their own
interests (Mueller 2003 , 1). The premise of self-interest rules out
direct concern for the welfare of others. This assumption allows
that officials might consider the welfare of other people or concerns
of fairness only to the extent that these affect their self-interest
(Frohlich and Oppenheimer 2004 ). In the political domain, this
assumption entails organized interest groups inducing self-interested
government officials to pursue policies that advance the former ’ s
interests in return for benefits.

The pivotal role of self-interest in the development of this
understanding is reflected in the revisionist theory put forward
by Anthony Downs and its more recent iterations. The logic of
collective action means that relatively small and homogenous groups
are much more effective than the public at large at promoting their
narrow interests. On the assumption that public officials, both
elected and appointed, aim to maximize their own utility rather
than promote the public interest, Downs further deduced that
public officials cultivate coalitions of support of interest groups
by adopting policies that favor these groups in return for their
support (Downs 1957 ). These assumptions have been supported by
consequent studies of regulatory politics (Becker 1983 ; Peltzman
1976 ; Stigler 1971 ; Wilson 1980 ), leading to a broadly shared view

Explaining Self-Interested Behavior of Public-Spirited Policy Makers 581

that relatively small groups use regulation to attain favorable results
that they cannot attain through the market.

Admittedly, attending to the narrow interests of certain groups
does not necessarily hinder the adequate functioning of
democratic governance or undermine social welfare (Croley 2010 ).
However, if public officials are predominantly self-interested, the
disproportionate power of interest groups to affect the present and
future utility of public officials may lead to policy choices that
prioritize these narrow interests over the greater good (Levine 1981 ;
McGinnis and Ostrom 2011 ). The resulting wealth shifts may be
neither efficient nor fair (Shapiro and Tomain 2003 , 81).

While the prospect of reelection is a key motivation for elected
officials, bureaucrats are assumed to enhance their utility by
maximizing discretionary budgets (Migué, Bélanger, and Niskanen
1974 ; Niskanen 1975 ) and their prospects of future employment in
the private sector (Stigler 1971 ). These goals suggest that officials who
wish to secure their position and capacity to intervene in the economy
find it in their interest to be responsive to legislators on behalf of their
constituents (Fiorina and Noll 1979 ). Several subsequent studies have
provided empirical support for the responsiveness of bureaucrats to
the preferences of their elected overseers (Weingast and Moran 1983 ;
Wintrobe 1997 ; Wood and Waterman 1993 ).

One key entailment of the premise of self-interest in the
administrative and political context is the agency problem. The
agency problem was studied extensively in the social sciences
during the twentieth century—first in the context of corporations
(Berle and Means 1932 ) and gradually in other social, economic,
and political contexts as well (e.g., Ferejohn 1986 ; McCubbins
and Schwartz 1984 ; Miller 1992 , 2005 ). The principal–agent
theory posits that social and political interactions are founded on
arrangements of delegation and accountability, whereby one party
(the principal) delegates authority to another (the agent), and the
welfare of the former is affected by the choices made by the latter
(Arrow 1985 ; Eisenhardt 1989 ; Scott 1998 ). Consistent with
economic rationality, both actors are assumed to be self-interested
maximizers. While economic rationality is efficient in perfectly
competitive markets, when coupled with asymmetric information,
it leads to suboptimal equilibria. The agent ’ s self-interest typically
results in a divergence of his or her interests from those of the
principal. This conflict of interest is further exacerbated by the
fact that (1) the agent typically possesses information that the
principal does not (hidden information), (2) the agent ’ s behavior is
usually difficult for the principal to monitor (hidden action), and
(3) outcome-based monitoring is often hindered by uncertainties
about the translation of the agent ’ s actions into results. For all these
reasons, the agency problem is both a persistent feature of social life
and inherently hard to solve (Miller and Whitford 2007 ).

To be sure, PCT may account for prosocial public choices, especially
when circumstances limit one ’ s ability to act in a self-interested
manner. For example, the theory of constitutional government
(Buchanan and Tullock 1962 ) posits that when individuals are
uncertain about their future positions, they are drawn out of their
self-interest to choose rules that take into account the positions
of all other individuals. Similar examples can be found in the
theory of public goods, the prisoner ’ s dilemma, and insurable

risks, which demonstrate how self-interested individuals can reach
collective agreements (Mueller 2003 , 603). In principle, economic
analysis, including PCT, may also do away with the assumption of
motivational rationality, taking all of people ’ s preferences, including
other-regarding ones, as given (Francois 2000 ). However, more
often than not, PCT predicts that officials ’ decisions will further
their own interests rather than the public good.

The behavioral assumptions underpinning PCT are indeed
parsimonious and foster the development of models. However,
numerous scientific works in psychology and behavioral economics
have questioned their empirical validity. The primary critiques of
PCT center on its assumptions that officials are perfectly rational and
invariably self-interested. Let us briefly review these two critiques.

Criticism of the Behavioral Assumptions of
Public Choice Theory
It has been argued that the behavioral assumptions of PCT—
specifically, that public officials are cognitively rational and solely
motivated by self-interest—are overly simplistic. Critics of the
premise of cognitive rationality argue that suboptimal choices and
policies are often the result of bounded rationality (Jones 2001 ),
cognitive limitations, and heuristics and biases (Cooper and Kovacic
2012 ; Rachlinski and Farina 2002 ; see also Bendor 2015 ; Berggren
2012 ; Schnellenbach and Schubert 2015 ; Viscusi and Gayer 2015 ).
Nothing in our analysis detracts from these cogent observations.
However, our focus is on the critique of the second premise, namely,
studies that demonstrate the prevalence of nonselfish motivations.

Experimental studies have shown that people often deviate from
strictly self-interested choices and are willing to forgo personal
gain for the sake of fairness (Fehr and Fischbacher 2003 ; Gächter
2014 ). Indeed, unselfish motivations are no longer excluded from
leading theories of economic behavior (Bolton and Ockenfels 2000 ;
Fehr and Schmidt 1999 ). In the sphere of public administration,
numerous studies have shown that policy makers are often
motivated by a desire to promote public and social interests. Public
service motivation (PSM) theory, for example, suggests that self-
selection in the processes of joining the public sector results in
organizations whose typical staff are disproportionately motivated
by prosocial concerns (Georgellis, Iossa, and Tabvuma 2011 ;
Perry 1996 ), which, in turn, mitigates some aspects of the agency
problem (Gailmard 2010 ; Perry, Hondeghem, and Wise 2010 ;
Perry and Wise 1990 ). These findings regarding the importance
of intrinsic prosocial motivation rely on survey-reported values
and attitudes as a proxy for such motives (Georgellis, Iossa, and
Tabvuma 2011 ). These include a self-reported attraction to policy
making, a commitment to serving the public interest, compassion
and self-sacrifice (Perry 1996 ), and the desire to work “in a job
that allows one to help other people” and “that is useful to society”
(Crewson 1997 , 502; see also Feeney 2008 , 489; Georgellis, Iossa,
and Tabvuma 2011 , 480; Lewis and Frank 2002 ; Tschirhart et
al. 2008 ). Other organizational theories suggest that a sense of
common identity and commitment, as well as socialization, are
instrumental in enhancing public servant ’ s prosocial behavior
(Carpenter and Krause 2015 ; DiIulio 1994 ; Robertson, Wang, and
Trivisvavet 2007 ). This is particularly true when social interaction
and communication form part of the precontractual negotiation
(Bottom et al. 2006 ; Charness and Dufwenberg 2006 ).

582 Public Administration Review • July | August 2018

The Puzzle: Problematic Behavioral Assumptions and
High Predictive Power
Given its debatable behavioral premises—particularly with regard to
the centrality of self-interest—one might expect PCT to regularly
fail in predicting governmental decisions and policies. In reality,
however, PCT often appears to do this quite successfully. The
empirical results of decades of studies indicate that a broad range
of decisions by elected and nonelected public officials appear to
be motivated by self-interest. Specifically, various policy decisions
by elected officials have been found to be guided by reelection
considerations. Notable examples include U.S. federal spending
patterns across states (Wright 1974 ), the use of U.S. presidential
veto power (Grier, McDonald, and Tollison 1995 ), decisions by
British prime ministers with regard to elections timing (Smith
2003 ), and decisions by U.K. cabinet ministers on whether to
appoint a public inquiry into a given crisis (Sulitzeanu-Kenan
2010 ). While reelection considerations may align with the general
public interest, this is obviously not always the case.

Other successful predictions of PCT include patterns of regulation
(Carron 1983 ; Peltzman 1976 ; Stigler 1971 ), the relationship
between campaign contributions and (lenient) regulatory policy
(De Figueiredo and Edwards 2007 ), and findings that suggest that
even the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—one of the most
professional and reputable public organizations—is influenced by
organized interests and the media in its drug approval decisions
and enforcement activities (Carpenter 2002 ; Maor and Sulitzeanu-
Kenan 2013 ). More broadly, several studies provide consistent
evidence that both domestic and foreign policies reflect the
preferences of elites and organized interests rather than the average
voter or general public (Bartels 2008 ; Gilens and Page 2014 ; Jacobs
and Page 2005 ; Schlozman, Verba, and Brady 2012 ).

To be sure, the predictions of PCT are not invariably correct, and
some phenomena are better explained by PSM and other competing
theories—or some combination thereof. Nevertheless, the intriguing
disjunction between the predictive power of the self-interest premise
and its moot behavioral foundations calls for further investigation.
The following section offers a possible resolution to this puzzle.

Public Choice Theory Meets Behavioral Ethics
Recent advances in the study of moral behavior delineate several
consistent findings that enable us to propose a complementary
behaviorally based theory for the choices made by public officials.
In this section, we provide a bird ’ s-eye exposition of BE, followed
by an explanation of how its insights complement PCT. Note that
BE studies strive to account for people ’ s unethical behavior given
their ethical convictions. These studies do not provide a normative
assessment of those convictions or a normative critique of PCT or
rational choice theory more generally. Much like PCT, the study of
behavioral ethics is primarily descriptive and explanatory in nature
rather than normative.

Behavioral Ethics
General . This subsection presents the main insights of BE, with
particular emphasis on those with direct bearing on governmental
decision making. (For overviews of BE, see Bazerman and Gino
2012 ; Bazerman and Tenbrunsel 2011 ; Bellé and Cantarelli 2017 ;
Bereby-Meyer and Shalvi 2015 ; Feldman 2014 ; Kish-Gephart,

Harrison, and Treviño 2010 .) It should be stressed at the outset that
BE does not offer a simple and coherent theory of human behavior
of the sort put forward by standard economic analysis. As Daniel
Kahneman points out, “life is more complex for behavioral
economists than for true believers in human rationality” (2011, 412).
There are, however, basic concepts that underpin much of BE—
chief among which are dual reasoning and motivated reasoning.

Dual reasoning . As previously noted, recent decades have witnessed
a wealth of experimental and observational studies fi nding that
people ’ s choices and decisions routinely deviate from models of
rational decision making. One major explanation for these
deviations is that people use two modes of thinking—commonly
known as System 1 and System 2 (Evans 2008 ; Kahneman 2011 ;
Stanovich and West 2000 ). System 1 thinking is intuitive and
holistic, context dependent, and implicit. It is based on heuristics
that people acquire through personal experience, as well as innate
ones, and it serves us well in most daily tasks. In contrast, System 2
is conscious, deliberative, and analytical. It employs rules that are
explicitly learned. While System 1 is automatic, quick, and
relatively undemanding of cognitive capacities, System 2 is
controlled, slow, and exacting. The effortless, speedy, and
autonomous nature of System 1 makes it dominant a priori—
that is, it controls behavior by default, unless analytical
reasoning intervenes (Evans 2006 ; Stanovich 2011 , 19–22).
While System 2 may intervene and regulate System 1 when the
latter leads to suboptimal results, people often stick to the
intuitive choices of System 1 and use System 2 mainly to
provide justifi cations for those choices (Thompson 2009 ;
Trouche et al. 2015). Dual reasoning has been adopted in
political science (Lodge and Taber 2013 ), although mostly in
the subfi elds of political psychology and public opinion rather
than in studies of elite behavior and public administration.

The concept of dual reasoning plays a key role not only in studies
of judgment and decision making but also in BE research. Many
BE studies show how automatic processes facilitate the promotion
of people ’ s interests and goals. Unlike standard economic analysis,
which posits that people deliberately maximize their utility, BE
focuses on automatic cognitive processes.

Motivated reasoning . The second basic mechanism that bears on
people ’ s ethical behavior is motivated reasoning. In her review of a
host of previous studies, Ziva Kunda ( 1990 ) argues that motivation
affects reasoning through the cognitive processes by which people
form impressions, determine their beliefs and attitudes, assess
evidence, and make decisions. While people are sometimes
motivated to reach an accurate conclusion, they often aim to reach a
particular (“directional”) conclusion—usually the one that best
serves their interests. When motivated by accuracy, people tend to
use the most appropriate strategies to attain that goal. In contrast,
directional motivations prompt people to use strategies that are
likely to yield the desired conclusion. Interestingly, directional
processing of information can be as detailed and thorough as
accuracy-motivated processing. Thus, information processing can be
simultaneously thorough and biased (Kunda 1990 ).

Motivated reasoning affects not only the decision process but also
ex post recollection. People misremember both what they have done

Explaining Self-Interested Behavior of Public-Spirited Policy Makers 583

and what they were told to do when that allows them to believe that
they have acted ethically. In some experiments, participants who
were given an opportunity to cheat tended to forget the precepts of
an honor code they had previously read, far more than participants
who were not given such an opportunity (Kouchaki and Gino 2016 ;
Shu, Gino, and Bazerman 2011 ).

Automaticity of self-interest . Considerable evidence supports the
claim that self-interest affects ethical behavior through System 1
thinking. Self-interest is “automatic, viscerally compelling, and often
unconscious,” while compliance with professional obligations is “a
more thoughtful process” (Moore and Loewenstein 2004 , 189; see
also Epley and Caruso 2004 ; Hughes and Zaki 2015 ). The
automatic nature of self-interest makes it diffi cult for people to be
aware of it—hence, they are unlikely to counteract its effect on their
reasoning. For example, in one set of experiments, subjects were fi rst
asked to make estimates on behalf of one party (e.g., a prospective
buyer or seller) and then incentivized to make estimates as
objectively as possible (Moore, Tanlu, and Bazerman 2010 ). It was
found that affi liation with one party not only biased the original
estimates, as predicted by the notion of motivated reasoning, but
that this bias carried over to the subsequent estimate—despite
monetary incentives to being objective and accurate (see also Engel
and Glöckner 2013 ). Furthermore, subjects tended to signifi cantly
underestimate their own bias. It appears that subjects actually
believed their biased assessments. The notion that unethical,
self-interested behavior is automatic (and only partly curtailed by
self-control) is also supported by the fi nding that time pressure
increases the incidence of self-serving unethical behavior, while
ample time reduces it (unless one is able to come up with
justifi cations for one ’ s actions) (Bereby-Meyer and Shalvi 2015 ;
Shalvi, Eldar, and Bereby-Meyer 2012 ). Finally, a recent study
showed that when subjects were experimentally manipulated into an
intuitive/automatic mind-set, they tended to act in a more self-
interested manner than when they were manipulated into an
analytical/deliberative mind-set (Feldman and Halali 2017 ).

While the majority view in the literature emphasizes the role of
System 1 in unethical behavior, the picture is more nuanced: System
1 thinking does not always lead to selfish behavior, and people do,
sometimes, deliberately and consciously violate moral and social
norms (Bereby-Meyer and Shalvi 2015 ; Feldman 2014 ; Hughes and
Zaki 2015 ). In circumstances of explicit social exchange, such as
economic games, cooperation and reciprocity—rather than self-
interested defection—appear to be the automatic response (Halali,
Bereby-Meyer, and Meiran 2014 ; Rand, Greene, and Nowak 2012 ).

Factors and mechanisms . A common theme of BE studies is that
ordinary “good people” sometimes do “bad things” (Bazerman,
Loewenstein, and Moore 2002 ; Bersoff 1999 ; Mazar, Amir, and
Ariely 2008 ). People tend to display moral hypocrisy—that is,
they are motivated “to appear moral in one ’ s own and other ’ s
eyes while, if possible, avoiding the cost of actually being
moral” (Batson et al. 1999 , 525). While rational choice theory
might predict that people totally disregard ethical norms, in
fact, they tend to breach those norms only to the extent that
they can maintain their self-image as honest people (Bazerman
and Gino 2012 ). As Nina Mazar and her colleagues put it,
“people behave dishonestly enough to profi t but honestly

enough to delude themselves of their own integrity. A little bit
of dishonesty gives a taste of profi t without spoiling a positive
self-view” (Mazar, Amir, and Ariely 2008 , 633).

A telling demonstration of this observation is found in an
experiment in which all subjects were “mistakenly” overpaid for
their participation, and the conspicuousness of the unethicality of
not correcting this mistake was treated by varying the identity of
the “victim” of this behavior (an overseas firm that had financed
the experiment or the experimenter) and the extent to which
subjects were indirectly induced to deliberate on ethical issues
(Bersoff 1999 ). The more difficult it was made for subjects to
ignore the unethicality of keeping the excess payment and its
adverse effect on a specific person, the more they tended to point
out the overpayment. Increasing the saliency of dishonesty has
been found to reduce cheating in other experiments as well (Gino,
Ayal, and Ariely 2009 ). Similarly, it was found that specific rules
reduce unethical decisions more than general ones because the
former curtail people ’ s ability to rationalize their behavior (Mulder,
Jordan, and Rink 2015 ). Finally, when people are faced with a
self-benefiting choice that might harm someone else, they prefer
not to know whether such harm would indeed ensue, so that they
can make that choice in good conscience (Dana, Weber, and Kuang
2007 ; see also Mazar, Amir, and Ariely 2008 ; Shalvi et al. 2011 ).

People use several means of self-deception to avoid recognizing
the unethicality of their behavior (Tenbrunsel and Messick 2004 ).
These include the use of euphemisms (such as “creative accounting”
or claiming to act “rationally” rather than “egoistically”), ethical
numbing (when a morally dubious behavior is repeated), and
putting the blame on others. Indeed, under certain circumstances,
these and comparable mechanisms of moral disengagement may
lead not only to lying and cheating but also to the perpetration of
large-scale atrocities (Bandura 1999 ). Other mechanisms include
moral justification (i.e., rationalizing the immoral behavior on
the grounds that it serves an important social or moral purpose),
advantageous comparison (contrasting the behavior in question with
even more reprehensible conduct), and distortion of consequences—
in particular, minimizing the seriousness of the adverse effects of
one ’ s behavior (Bandura 1999 ; Moore et al. 2012 ; see also Ayal and
Gino 2012 ). Unethical behavior is also deemed more justified when
it benefits not only oneself but others as well, thereby allowing one
to present it as altruistic (Gino, Ayal, and Ariely 2013 ).

While some studies have shown that people care not only about
fulfilling their interests but about fairness (Kahneman, Knetsch,
and Thaler 1986 ; Zamir and Ritov 2011 ), it appears that fairness
concerns often do not restrain unethical behavior, as fairness is a
highly malleable concept. For example, people make self-serving
judgments of fairness in the context of bargaining (Thompson and
Loewenstein 1992 ). Therefore, while portraying people as solely
self-interested is overly simplistic, people ’ s concern for fairness does
not guarantee that they will act fairly.

Social and organizational factors . To fully understand unethical
behavior and its implications for self-interested behavior of public
offi ceholders, the role of social and organizational factors should be
considered. 1 Psychologists have long studied the conformity
effect—namely, people ’ s tendency to adapt their behavior to suit

584 Public Administration Review • July | August 2018

group norms (Forsyth 2012 ). This tendency pertains to unethical
behavior as well as to other contexts. For example, it was found that
viewing the unethical behavior of another person increased the
unethical behavior of participants when that person was perceived as
an in-group member but decreased it when the person was
considered an out-group member (Gino, Ayal, and Ariely 2009 ; see
also Ayal and Gino 2012 ). The closer people feel to someone who
sets an example of unethical behavior, the less harshly they judge
that behavior, and the more likely they are to engage in such
behavior themselves (Gino and Galinsky 2012 ).

A meta-analysis in the context of organizations found a weak positive
correlation between an egoistic work environment and unethical
behavior and moderate negative correlations between benevolent
and principled ethical climates and unethical choices (Kish-Gephart,
Harrison, and Treviño 2010 ). In a recent meta-analysis, Bellé and
Cantarelli ( 2017 ) found that social influences such as exposure
to unethical behavior by in-group members or interdependence
with other individuals benefiting from one ’ s unethical actions
increase unethical behavior. A robust negative correlation was found
between an ethical culture—including high ethical standards set
by managers and the disciplinary enforcement of an existing code
of conduct—and unethical conduct. Another experimental study
further substantiated the effect of an unethical business culture in the
banking system on the ethical behavior of its employees (Cohn, Fehr,
and Maréchal 2014 ). More fundamentally, it has been demonstrated
that cooperation significantly increases unethical behavior, to the
extent that “dishonesty estimates observed in past work may have
been conservative in comparison with settings in which people work
in collaboration” (Weisel and Shalvi 2015 , 10653).

The findings that unethical behavior is largely automatic and
that many mechanisms exist that allow people to overlook the
unethicality of their conduct pose serious challenges for any attempt
to discourage such behavior. If unethical behavior is not the product
of cost–benefit analysis, then raising its expected costs (for example,
through legal sanctions) would not necessarily be effective (Feldman
2014 ). We will discuss this challenge and further policy implications
of BE later in this article.

A Behavioral Ethics Basis for Public Choice
Theory ’ s Predictions
The insights of BE imply that one need not subscribe to the
cynical view that when public officials advance their own interests
at the expense of the public good, they do so consciously and
deliberately. Public officials may well be “good people” who are
committed to the ethos of civil service and to norms of impartiality
and advancement of the overall social welfare. They are, however,
human beings—and as such, they are susceptible to automatic and
often unconscious self-serving biases that may lead them to make
decisions that advance their own interests, and those of powerful
interest groups, rather than the general good.

This claim is consistent with previous findings that challenge the
assertion that public officials behave in a self-interested manner. The
psychological mechanisms by which self-interest affects behavior
as described by BE studies differ from the processes that are
assumed to occur under PCT—and these differences may account
for this apparent contradiction. As previously noted, the PSM

literature ’ s conclusion about the importance of intrinsic prosocial
motivation uses self-reported values and attitudes as a proxy for
such motives. Other studies similarly rely on reported accounts,
which are subsequently analyzed either qualitatively (DiIulio
1994 ) or quantitatively (Robertson, Wang, and Trivisvavet 2007 ).
While these reported motivations do indeed pose a real challenge
to PCT, which assumes strictly selfish motivations, they are not
similarly problematic for the BE account. In fact, BE shares the
PSM literature ’ s view that people care about prosocial and ethical
concerns as well as their self-interest. 2 However, it suggests that
many behaviors, which have hitherto been assumed to be deliberate
and conscious, are the product of automatic processes. Such ethical
violations remain consciously unregistered because of effective
rationalization mechanisms—a phenomenon dubbed an “ethical
blind spot” (Banaji and Greenwald, 2013 ; Chugh, Bazerman, and
Banaji 2005 ; Sezer, Gino, and Bazerman 2015 ; Terbenusel et al.
2010; see also Pronin, Lin, and Ross 2002 ). These mechanisms
allow people to deviate from consciously held values, such as
those associated with being a public servant, while maintaining a
conscious adherence to those values.

However, the application of BE insights in the public sphere may
be challenged. As described in the previous subsection, most BE
studies pertain to basic moral prohibitions on lying, cheating,
and stealing rather than the duty of public officials to advance the
public good. They look at individual and simple decision making
by private individuals during a single laboratory session rather than
collective, procedurally structured, and repeated decision making
by public officials over an extended period of time. All of these
differences call for caution when applying insights from BE to
governmental decision making and for additional inquiry into its
special characteristics—issues we elaborate in the next two sections.
We nevertheless believe that such application is warranted—in some
respects even a fortiori.

Let us begin with the pertinent norms—the prohibitions on
cheating and stealing versus the duty to pursue the public good
rather than that of powerful interest groups or one ’ s own interests.
Arguably, promoting one ’ s self-interest (or those of small interest
groups) instead of the public good is different from lying and
cheating: the duty to promote the public good is not an entrenched,
basic moral norm, and it is more ambiguous than the prohibition
on dishonest behavior, as it is often unclear what constitutes the
“public good” and which course of action best serves it.

In response, there is an important common denominator between
BE studies and the current context—namely, the role of self-interest
vis-à-vis competing norms. This is true whether the competing
norm is “Do not lie,” “Do not steal,” or “Do not promote your
interests at the expense of the public good.” When a public official
who is entrusted with promoting the public good pursues his or
her own interests (or those of a particular interest group) instead,
such conduct is akin to unfaithfulness and cheating. Just as the
prohibition on cheating is entrenched in commonsense morality, the
proscription of conflicts of interest is a common, fundamental, and
well-known tenet among public officials.

More importantly, the differences between the private and
public spheres make the insights of BE all the more relevant in

Explaining Self-Interested Behavior of Public-Spirited Policy Makers 585

the latter sphere, as the psychological mechanisms that facilitate
unfaithfulness and cheating are especially suited to enabling the
self-serving decisions predicted by PCT. Among other things,
the fact that the duty to promote the public good and to avoid
conflicts of interest is less obvious and less clear than the moral
prohibitions on lying and cheating makes violations of the former
less conspicuous. In this context, reflecting on the politics of
interest groups elicits new insights. Powerful interest groups may be
influential because of their ability to gather, analyze, and provide
officials with convincing evidence and arguments—and they may
also hold the power to harm or benefit those same officials. While
standard PCT concentrates on the latter aspect, behavioral ethics
draws attention to interest groups ’ ability to obscure the boundaries
of the “public interest,” thereby enabling officeholders to concede to
interest groups ’ demands while maintaining a moral self-perception.
This insight is in line with recent advances in political science
that construe lobbying as a legislative subsidy (Hall and Deardorff
2006 ). However, it extends the strictly informational benefits that
this model entails by showing how such information makes it easier
to rationalize questionable policy choices. Consequently, the fact
that governmental decision making is often a prolonged process
does not necessarily make self-interested decisions less likely, as
more time fosters greater rationalization.

As for the argument that most BE studies refer to individual
decisions rather than collective ones and do not examine repeated
decisions over extended periods of time, it should first be noted
that many public officials do make decisions individually. More
importantly, the available data indicate that infringements of
moral and social norms may be more—rather than less—prevalent
in collaborative environments (Weisel and Shalvi 2015 ) and
in repeated settings (because of ethical numbing). Two other
characteristics of public officials ’ decision making that make norm
infringement more likely are the organizational setting of the
public sphere, which makes it much easier to cast blame on others
(Thompson 1980 ), and the fact that in the public sphere, the
“victims” of biased policies are typically unidentified, faceless people
(Bersoff 1999 ).

Another difference between the private and public spheres, which
makes BE potentially more important in the latter, is that in the
private sphere—particularly in market settings—there is nothing
wrong with pursuing one ’ s own interest. On the contrary, the beauty
of the competitive market is that it facilitates the maximization of
social utility when each person pursues his or her own interest (with
the exceptions of agency problems, as in the case of corporations or
in attorney-client relationships).

Additionally, it has been shown that winning a contest produces
a sense of entitlement that induces people to act less ethically
(Schurr and Ritov 2016 ). If this is the case, it stands to reason that
elected officials, and other functionaries who owe their positions to
winning in an election or in a competitive environment, would be
particularly prone to violating norms for their own benefit. Finally,
although public officials are typically experts who use professional
procedures when making decisions over extended periods of
time, several findings suggest that this practice cannot, in and of
itself, guarantee that their choices will be ethically sound. First,
studies have shown that the degree of myside bias is similar across

intelligence and cognitive ability levels (for a review, see Stanovich,
West, and Toplak 2013 ). Second, the use of explicit reasoning
(System 2) and enhanced expertise has been found to be associated
with higher rates of motivated reasoning (see, respectively, Kahan
2011 , 2013 ; Taber and Lodge 2013).

Before proceeding to examine the theoretical and policy
implications of our thesis, it is important to reiterate that our
argument is not based on the naive assumption that all public
officials are “good people” who fail to do the right thing solely
because of automatic and unconscious psychological processes.
Some public officials undoubtedly deliberately and consciously
breach legal, organizational, and moral norms. The crux of our
argument is that even if most public officials are well-intentioned
and honest people, they are liable to make socially undesirable, self-
serving decisions. Hence, the predictions of PCT need not hinge on
the disputable assumption that public officials are strictly rational
maximizers of their own utility, who do not care about the general
good.

Theoretical and Policy Implications
Our proposed thesis entails a number of theoretical and policy
implications. First, it provides a stronger, empirically based
foundation for PCT ’ s predictions without relying on simplistic,
questionable assumptions about human motivation. Rather than
using behavioral insights to challenge the predictions of PCT—
as commentators have long done—our thesis strengthens the
behavioral basis of PCT ’ s predictions.

Concomitantly, some of the predictions and policy implications of
our thesis clearly diverge from those of standard PCT. The following
propositions highlight these divergences:

Proposition 1: Holding the potential gains and risks involved
in a self-interested decision constant, the more salient a
decision maker ’ s conflict of interest is, the less likely he or she
is to make a self-serving decision.

Proposition 1a: A conflict of interest is more salient when
the personal gain from a decision is larger, it is more tangible
and concrete, and the divergence between the private and
public interests is greater.

PCT advocates measures that aim to align the interests of public
officials with those of the public at large. A perfect alignment would
indeed eliminate the problem of conflicts of interest—but this is
rarely, if ever, attainable. Partial alignment of interests mitigates
the agency problem, but at the expense of rendering the conflict
of interest less salient. Alas, diminished saliency renders unethical
behavior more likely, as it makes it easier for people to believe
that their decisions serve the overall good. Therefore, it is a mixed
blessing.

To put it another way: according to standard PCT, the clearer it is
to the decision maker that his or her interests diverge from those of
the public at large, the more likely he or she is to give precedence to
the former (at least insofar as the decision maker believes that he or
she could get away with it). BE, however, predicts the opposite: the
starker this divergence, the harder it is for the decision maker to use

586 Public Administration Review • July | August 2018

a host of mechanisms that would shield him or her from recognizing
the immorality of her decisions—thus making him or her less
likely to act immorally. Suppose, for example, that the term for a
contractor ’ s agreement is about to end, and a public official faces
a choice between issuing a new competitive tender and extending
the agreement with the current contractor. While the government
may get better performance and possibly save money through a
competitive tender, the new contractor may not be as good as the
previous one, and the tasks involved in handling the tender and
changing to a new contractor are likely to entail considerable extra
work for the official. Unlike situations in which a public official
stands to gain directly and substantially from her decision, here
the subtle divergence between public and personal interests may
easily be overlooked, and the official may well make a self-interested
decision without being aware of her self-serving bias. In the same
vein, from a BE perspective, the risk that public officials might make
biased decisions as a result of a monetary bribe is smaller than the
risk that they might do so in return for immaterial benefits (either
actual or expected), such as political support or peer recognition.
This is because immaterial benefits are much less likely to trigger a
critical reflection by System 2 thinking and therefore more likely to
compromise the moral conduct of “good people” (Feldman 2014 ).

This claim is graphically depicted in figure 1 . The x-axis denotes
the perceived divergence of interests between the official and the
public at large (whereby 0 = perfect alignment, and 10 = maximum
misalignment of interests), 3 and the y-axis depicts the likelihood of
the official advancing his or her own interest. While standard PCT
predicts a monotonic increasing function, BE predicts a concave
function, whereby the likelihood of a self-serving decision initially
increases but begins to decrease at a certain point as the conflict of
interest becomes more salient.

Proposition 2: While expertise and experience may improve
governmental decision making because professional civil
servants are less likely to rely on simple heuristics, professional
civil servants are not necessarily less susceptible to self-serving
biases than elected officials.

From a heuristics-and-biases perspective, professional expertise is
by no means a panacea against decision failures (e.g., Zamir 2015 ,
33–36). Nonetheless, it has been argued that professional civil servants
are less likely to fall prey to the cognitive biases that affect elected
politicians, thanks to the decision strategies that they develop to
overcome the perils of intuitive decision making. Hence, the optimal
arrangement may be to divide decision making between political,
professional, and judicial bodies (Rachlinski and Farina 2002 ).

The picture becomes more complex once BE insights are taken
into account. On the one hand, conflicts of interest may be more
prevalent among elected officials than appointed ones. On the
other hand, professional decision makers may be more susceptible
than laypeople to some of the automatic psychological mechanisms
that facilitate norm violations. These include slippery slopes—the
psychological numbing that comes from repetition—and the
prevalent use of euphemisms (Bazerman and Tenbrunsel 2011 ,
91–94, 123–24; Tenbrunsel and Messick 2004 ). Indeed, self-serving
biases have been found among professionals such as experienced
negotiators (Babcock and Lowenstein 1997 ) and academic
coauthors (Caruso, Epley, and Bazerman 2006 ). Moreover, it has
been demonstrated that professionalism—or, more specifically,
seeing oneself as a professional, that is, as one who is technically or
morally superior in some way—may actually increase unethical
behavior because it licenses one to act unethically (Kouchaki 2012 ).

From a policy perspective, if simple incentives are less likely to
counteract automatic and possibly unconscious process, what else
can be done to improve governmental decisions? One measure—
which is already in place in many legal systems—is to disqualify
public officials from making decisions in cases in which they may
be biased (Wade and Forsyth 2014 , 384–404). This rule not only
invalidates biased decisions but also seeks to eliminate the potential
for such decisions. A common justification for the rule is the
appearance of propriety: justice must not only be done but also be
seen to be done. Indeed, courts and scholars have noted that a major
(if not the major) purpose of this rule is not to prevent deliberate
abuse of power but rather to prevent nondeliberate abuse (Farina
1993 , 296–97; see also Regina v. Inner West London Coroner ex p
Dallaglio [1994] 4 All ER 139, 152).

However, the concern that automatic and largely unconscious biases
may hinder the promotion of the public good extends far beyond
the instances covered by the legal rule; hence additional measures
seem necessary. One option that comes to mind is to use mild,
noncoercive means—similar to the much-discussed “nudges” in the
behavioral economics literature (Thaler and Sunstein 2009 ). The
following proposition may guide such interventions:

Proposition 3: Holding potential gains and risks from self-
interested behavior constant, self-serving behavior may be
reduced by greater awareness of the relevant norms—which,
in turn, may be achieved by drawing officials ’ attention to
them before they make decisions, emphasizing personal
responsibility, and inculcating an ethical work environment.

It has been shown that moral disengagement and motivated
forgetting of ethical rules can be significantly reduced by simple
devices, such as having participants read or sign an honor code

0 1 3 4 5 62 7 8 9 10

Perceived divergence of interests

T
h

e
l
ik

e
li
h

o
o

d
o

f
a

s
e

lf
-s

e
rv

in
g

a
c
t

PCT BE

Figure 1 The Hypothetical Likelihood of Acting Self-Interestedly
under PCT and BE Assumptions, Holding the Likelihood of
Detection Constant

Explaining Self-Interested Behavior of Public-Spirited Policy Makers 587

before engaging in an activity (Shu, Gino, and Bazerman 2011 ), or
by other explicit messages regarding the relevant norm (Feldman
and Halali 2017 ). It has also been experimentally demonstrated that
people who might be tempted to be dishonest in a written report are
significantly less tempted if they are asked to sign the report before
(rather than after) completing it (Shu et al. 2012 ). It may thus be
advisable to structure administrative processes such that explicit
declarations of fidelity (e.g., signature, oath, etc.) would precede
and be temporally proximate to the provision of information or
the making of decisions to which these declarations refer. That
said, measures taken to increase the saliency of ethical norms—
such as asking people to disclose their conflicts of interest—may
also backfire because of moral licensing: people who disclose their
conflicts of interest may feel morally licensed to act in a more
biased manner following such disclosure (Cain, Loewenstein, and
Moore 2005 ; on disambiguation and accountability as antidotes to
unethical behavior, see also Feldman 2014 ).

These mixed results call for caution when deriving policy
recommendations from the available findings. Some researchers
have conjectured that nudge-like measures may encounter greater
resistance in the context of unethical behavior than in the heuristics-
and-biases context (and thus be less successful) because in the
latter case, nudges are often used to align people ’ s decisions with
what is demonstrably their true self-interest, whereas in the former
context, nudges are meant to suppress the actor ’ s self-interest
(Feldman 2014 ). However, if unethical behavior is often the result
of automatic biases, nudge-like measures should help ordinary
people who view themselves as honest to overcome those biases (as
demonstrated by Shu et al. 2012 ).

BE studies also show that implementing mild measures of
detecting and sanctioning improper behavior may sometimes
be counterproductive because they reframe the situation as one
of risky costs (probability of detection and sanction levels) and
benefits (from unethical behavior) to the actor rather than as an
ethical dilemma. Such measures may therefore crowd out intrinsic
motivation to act properly (Tenbrunsel and Messick 1999 ; see also
Langevoort 2005).

Other means may prove to be more effective. For example, to
counteract displacement of responsibility (Bandura 1999 ), it may be
desirable to emphasize the decision maker ’ s personal responsibility
for the outcomes of his or her decisions (rather than that of
superiors or the entire organization). Such means are congruent
with some of the measures adopted in New Public Management
reforms aimed at clarifying responsibility (Hood 1998 ; Schick
1996 ). However, those measures focused on responsibility for
performance rather than ethical conduct (Hood 1991 ; Schwartz
and Sulitzeanu-Kenan 2004 ). Insofar as the ethical culture in an
organization affects the behavior of individuals (Cohn, Fehr, and
Maréchal 2014 ; Kish-Gephart, Harrison, and Treviño 2010 ),
instilling a culture of high moral standards, enforcing those
standards, and associating them with people ’ s professional status
may prove beneficial. However, the effectiveness of formal systems
aimed at encouraging ethical behavior depends on their interaction
with the informal systems within any organization—and because
the latter vary considerably, it is difficult to come up with uniform
solutions for different organizations (Smith-Crowe et al. 2015 ).

As further detailed later, more studies are necessary in this regard.
While considerable progress has already been made in identifying
the factors affecting unethical behavior, much less is known about
how self-serving biases can be debiased and how unethical behavior
can be counteracted (Feldman 2014 ). Once it is understood that
improper decisions are the product of situational factors, social
norms, and individual differences, simple recipes are no longer
appropriate. The fact that much unethical behavior is the product of
automatic processes makes simple pricing of unethical behavior—
which would have affected people ’ s cost–benefit analysis—less
effective. Furthermore, the realization that people vary in their
conscious pursuit of self-interest and in their susceptibility to
unconscious self-serving biases implies that different people may
react differently—or even in opposite directions—to the same
measures. Designing measures that are beneficial to all people,
or that send different messages to different people (the notion of
acoustic separation), is very challenging (Feldman and Smith 2014 ).

From another perspective, the perception of governmental decision
makers as being self-interested and captured by rent seekers—and
public officials ’ resentment of this perception—results in mutual
distrust between the law courts and the general public on one side
and public administration on the other. This, in turn, gives rise to
calls to curtail the discretion held by public officials and aggressive
judicial and public oversight of the government. However, if it
transpires that suboptimal governmental decisions and policies
are not necessarily the product of ulterior motives, but very often
of human cognitive limitations and susceptibility to automatic
and largely unconscious biases, mutual suspicion may be replaced
by greater trust and respect, and there may be fewer calls to limit
administrative agencies ’ discretion (compare Rachlinski and Farina
2002 , 610–15).

Finally, zooming out from the political context and PCT, BE may
be able to contribute to a better understanding of principal–agent
relationships in other areas, in both the public and the private
domain. These include the relationships between managers and
corporations, between employees and employers, and between
professionals such as attorneys and physicians and their clients. Even
more fundamentally, BE can arguably account for the remarkable
ability of standard economic analysis to predict human behavior
despite its debatable premises about human motivation: even
if people are not egoistic maximizers of their own utility, they
often behave as though they are because of automatic and partly
unconscious self-serving biases.

Future Research
While great progress has been made in recent years in behavioral
studies of people ’ s ethicality, BE is a relatively young field of research.
There is still much to be learned about the situational, personal,
and social-environmental variables that affect ethical behavior and
their interrelationships. In particular, most BE studies have been
conducted in laboratory settings, involved simple moral dilemmas
about relatively minor dishonest behavior, and used untrained and
inexperienced people as subjects. While the few studies that have
attempted to test BE hypotheses in field settings provide preliminary
indications that the theory is not limited to isolated individual
decisions of subjects in laboratory experiments (e.g., Shu et al.
2012 ), there is an urgent need to address the challenges of external

588 Public Administration Review • July | August 2018

validity and generalizability of the (predominantly) laboratory-based
findings in more complex and realistic scenarios—particularly with
regard to governmental decision making.

One key difficulty facing future research in the context of
governmental policy making and decision making is that the
predictions of BE and standard PCT often overlap, and it is difficult
to tell apart conscious self-interested calculation from automatic and
partly unconscious self-serving biases. For example, under standard
PCT, elected public officials who represent certain constituencies
are more likely to make decisions that benefit their respective
constituencies at the expense of the overall social good than officials
elected by the entire population (Calabresi 1995 ; Weingast, Shepsle,
and Johnsen 1981 ). This, according to PCT, is how a rational
maximizer who wishes to maximize his or her chances of reelection
would act. Without sharing this cynical perception of elected officials,
BE would plausibly make the same prediction based on automatic
psychological process. Similarly, the finding that people tend to
behave more unethically when their dishonesty is less observable and
verifiable is consistent both with the findings of BE studies and with
deliberate calculation of the risks involved in unethical behavior.

However, as demonstrated earlier (see figure 1 ), the two theories also
offer diverging predictions. Theoretically specifying and empirically
testing these diverging predictions is a promising challenge of future
studies. In addition to the propositions laid out here, contrary to
standard PCT, BE predicts that for a given likelihood of being
sanctioned, decision makers would be more inclined to violate
a norm if the uncertainty is rooted in its ambiguity rather than
imperfect detection and enforcement—as empirically found in other
contexts (Feldman and Teichman 2009 ). The same is true of BE ’ s
prediction that surveillance may be counterproductive because it
crowds out the intrinsic motivation to act ethically.

Another set of new research questions pertains to the possible
differences between elected and unelected officials in terms of their
susceptibility to automatic self-serving biases, as envisaged by BE. As
previously noted, the basic predictions of both PCT and BE apply
to elected and unelected officials alike. However, the two groups
typically differ in terms of their professional expertise, long-term
goals, self-perception, and public accountability. Ideally, empirical
examination of how these differences affect the self-serving behavior
of these two groups and their susceptibility to various biases should
involve real officials, as emulating their characteristics and roles in a
laboratory setting appears to be quite difficult.

Importantly, there is considerable room for studying the efficacy of
various antidotes to self-serving decisions by public officials—from
simple incentives to nudge-like measures. Field experiments in which
different governmental decision makers are subjected to various
treatments in terms of the surveillance systems, level of enforcement,
or the inculcation of ethical standards, while all other variables are
kept as similar as possible, may be particularly fruitful in this regard.

In addition to academic researchers, a uniquely important role
in this context may be played by behavioral task forces such as
the U.S. Social and Behavioral Sciences Team and the British
Behavioral Insights Team, which have been established in recent
years to examine the incorporation of behavioral insights into

governmental policy (Choueiki 2016 ; Lunn 2012 ). These task
forces have the methodological competence and direct access to
governmental bodies, which may facilitate field experiments in this
sphere; they also can cooperate with academics specializing in BE.
Such cooperation may also yield cross-fertilization between BE and
public administration studies (compare Grimmelikhuijsen et al.
2017 ). Extending BE studies from the laboratory to the field, from
laypeople ’ s behavior to that of professionals, and from the private
to the public sphere, would be hugely beneficial not only to public
administration and political psychology but to BE as well.

Finally, the reality of political and administrative decision making
is exceedingly complex, hence it cannot be fully explained by
any single theory. To use Guido Calabresi ’ s famous image, each
theory—be it PCT, PSM, BE, or any other—offers but one view of
the cathedral (Calabresi and Melamed 1972 ). A major challenge of
future research is thus to delineate the contexts and circumstances
under which each theory (or any combination thereof ) provides a
more fruitful explanation of reality.

Conclusion
Economic analysis is a powerful analytical tool. It facilitates the
understanding of complex social phenomena through rigorous,
simple models; it questions accepted truths; and yields thought-
provoking (and often testable) predictions. At the same time, its
simplified assumptions about human nature often cast doubt on
its empirical validity. While we share the view that the behavioral
assumptions of economic analysis and PCT are flawed, we point to
recent psychological findings that actually reinforce most of PCT ’ s
predictions. Although people are often not rational maximizers of
their self-interest, but rather mindful of the welfare of others and
attentive to moral and social norms, various automatic psychological
mechanisms skew their ethical judgments and decisions in a
self-serving manner. Consequently, the decisions made by public
officials—be they corrupt and cynical or well intentioned—often
serve their own interests and those of powerful interest groups, as
though they were all rational maximizers of their own utility.

Just as one must be careful not to unquestioningly embrace the
tenets of standard PCT or to assume that public decisions invariably
promote the public good, one must take care when applying the
insights of BE to governmental processes and decision making.
We still know too little about the mechanisms underlying people ’ s
unethical behavior, and even less about how to induce people to
behave more ethically. However, if we wish to truly understand,
predict, and influence governmental decisions, we must consider the
findings of recent studies of ethical behavior and further study their
implications for politics and public administration.

Notes
1. We leave out of the discussion individual and demographic characteristics

(Kish-Gephart, Harrison, and Treviño 2010 ; Moore, Tanlu, and Bazerman
2012 ), as they are less relevant to the implications of BE for self-interest behavior
of public officials.

2. Leading scholars of PSM have observed that an open question remains regarding
“the relative importance of PSM compared to other motives” (Perry,
Hondeghem, and Wise 2010 , 688).

3. As noted earlier, situational, organizational, and social conditions may act to
alter the perceived location of a choice on the horizontal axis.

Explaining Self-Interested Behavior of Public-Spirited Policy Makers 589

Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Yoav Dotan, Asaf Eckstein, David Enoch,
Yuval Feldman, Joshua Guetzkow, Daphna Lewinsohn-Zamir,
Adi Libson, Ofer Malcai, Moshe Maor, and Barak Medina, as well
as participants in the Faculty of Law of the Hebrew University
seminar, the 2016 conference of the Israeli Association of Law and
Economics (Bar-Ilan University), the 2016 meeting of the European
Public Choice Society (Freiburg), and the 2016 conference of
the European Group for Public Administration (Utrecht) for
valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article. Shmuel Baron,
Tal Mendelson, Elad Spiegelman, and Roi Yair provided excellent
research assistance. This research was supported by the I-CORE
Program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee and the Israel
Science Foundation (Grant no. 1821/12).

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