Citizens’ Cognitive Processes with Psychological Costs

• In Event: Citizens and Street Level Bureaucrats in Rule Making

Abstract

Existing studies on burden relief have focused on randomly assigning behavioral interventions that decrease learning and compliance costs. The validity of behavioral inventions is rooted in behavioral psychology, which suggests that manipulating a person’s external environment will change their actions. However, the nature of psychological costs raises the relevance of also drawing on cognitive psychology, which uses multiple methods to study internal mental processes (i.e., memory, perception, problem-solving) that explain how psychological stress works. This study aims to infuse insights from cognitive psychology into the behaviorally driven administrative burden literature through a comparative, ethnographic study of psychological costs. Drawing on variance in gender-identity-related legislation in the U.S., this study compares the experiences of individuals in low and high psychological costs policy environments to closely examine how affected citizens process administrative burdens at school (i.e., name and pronoun use, facility and lock room use, and sports program participation) and subsequently cope with stress, stigma, shame, and autonomy loss. Participants are transgender youth and parents of transgender youth who are sampled from LGBTQ+ youth-serving nonprofit programs in Indiana and Colorado. At the time of the study, Indiana was considered a high administrative burden state, while Colorado was considered a low administrative burden state. Interviewees' experiences are analyzed with reference to the cognitive psychology paradigm to suggest a typology of mechanisms relevant to psychological costs. This paper seeks to build towards identifying nudges that can shift citizens' internal sense-making of experiences of psychological costs.

Author

• Shaun Khurana