Mistakes made by policy professionals can have devastating consequences. Nevertheless, policy professionals are trusted in these roles due to their expertise: that is, we expect policy professionals to have sufficient expertise in their field to not fall privy to decision-making traps. Banuri, Dercon, and Gauri (2019) document that policy professionals are subject to such biases. What is not well understood, however, is the role of subject matter expertise in mitigating biases. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that policy professionals with greater expertise are less likely to be sensitive to cognitive bias. Using a sample of development policy professionals (employees of the World Bank), and three experiments focusing on different cognitive biases (Outcome bias, Identifiable Victim Effect, Bandwagon Effect), we find that subject matter expertise helps mitigate some of these biases. Implications for policymaking are discussed.
