Model of Human Fallibility: Traveling Behavioral Assumptions in Public Governance.

The article focuses on the "model of human fallibility" (homo fallibilis) as a foundational behavioral assumption increasingly used in public governance and policy design. Tracing its intellectual roots from Herbert Simon's bounded rationality through Tversky and Kahneman's heuristics and biases to Thaler and Sunstein's concept of nudging, the model portrays human decision-making as systematically and predictably flawed. Illustrated through cases in Danish healthcare and energy consumption, the model travels across diverse public sectors by framing complex societal challenges as behavioral problems solvable primarily through behavioral design interventions that limit human discretion. The authors caution that this widespread adoption risks promoting an "anti-human stance" by sidelining alternative governance approaches that emphasize professional expertise, training, and situated judgment, thereby reducing normative and political issues to technical design problems. They call for critical research on the model's effects and exploration of complementary governance strategies that recognize human capacities for practical reasoning and learning.