Having grappled in the last chapter with the way in which British citizens approach the task of evaluating the ethical conduct of their elected representatives, we turn now to consideration of what people think about political conduct and their perceptions of the extent to which their leaders live up to the standards they hold for them. The content of people’s integrity perceptions is on the face of it quite amenable to examination. Yet the question of what drives people’s sceptical orientations has proved to be more difficult for scholars to ascertain. This is a topic on which there has been considerable prior research, both in the British and the comparative contexts. There is overwhelming evidence to suggest that most people in democratic states are critical of politicians and view them as having a tendency to act according to low ethical standards of conduct (Listhaug 1995; Norris 1999, 2011; Pharr 2000; Dalton 2004; Davis et al. 2004). In seeking to make sense of this finding, the political psychology literature can help us to develop a finding we touched upon briefly in Chapter 2: the common belief that political corruption is widespread, even in democracies and even in the absence of concrete evidence to that effect. In the 1970s, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman identified a number of ways in which human perceptions are systematically biased (Tversky and Kahneman 2000). Two of these, ‘availability’ and ‘adjustment and anchoring’, are particularly useful in helping to understand why it is that so many people perceive politicians to be corrupt.