The inevitable subjective nature of conservation: Psychological insights on the process of decision making

Taking a psychology perspective, the aim of thispaper is to reflect upon the cognitive biases con-servators are exposed to in the process of deci-sion making and how those decisions impact anartwork’s biography. Cognitive biases, such as ‘de-faults’, ‘the asymmetric dominance effect’, and ‘theanchoring effect’ are recurrent in areas of decisionmaking, as, for instance, in medical practice. Bycomparing them with conservation practice, it waspossible to conclude that these effects may alsoinfluence conservators. ‘Defaults’ and ‘the asym-metric dominance effect’ suggest that the framingand number of options influence the final choice.Moreover, ‘the anchoring effect’ implies that pres-ent decisions influence future decisions, thus hav-ing a direct impact on the artwork’s biography.As a conclusion, several suggestions for avoiding cognitive biases in conservation are proposed.