Evidence-based Decision Making — Prelims Strategy

Prelims Strategy

Focus on memorizing key concepts like hierarchy of evidence, major cognitive biases (confirmation bias, availability heuristic, anchoring bias), and the relationship between RTI Act and evidence-based governance.

Understand the distinction between evidence-based, expert-based, and intuition-based decision making. Practice identifying cognitive biases in given scenarios and recognizing appropriate evidence evaluation techniques.

Pay attention to current affairs connections, especially government initiatives like National Data Analytics Platform, Digital India, and various e-governance platforms. Common traps include confusing administrative hierarchy with evidence hierarchy, oversimplifying evidence types, and misunderstanding the role of intuition in decision making.

Use elimination techniques by identifying options that are too absolute or narrow in scope.