Citizens' preferences often diverge from perfect rationality due to cognitive shortcuts. Some of these shortcuts include loss aversion, where people place more importance on avoiding losses than gains; availability bias, where people are overly concerned about memorable but unlikely events; anchoring, where people are heavily influenced by starting points; short-termism, where people prefer small immediate rewards over larger distant ones; and inertia, where people put off decisions involving complexity, self-doubt, or inconvenience.