Ever since the British electorate set the United Kingdom on a path to leave the European Union, negotiations between London and Brussels aimed at ensuring that British interests are protected along the way have been anything but the proverbial ‘walk in the park’. Several observers have pointed out that flawed assumptions held by British negotiators about their European counterparts’ willingness to meet the UK’s demands translated into stuttering talks. In their article “Bounded rationality and the Brexit negotiations: why Britain failed to understand the EU” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Filipa Figueira and Benjamin Martill explore the sources of these biased assumptions. Drawing on evidence from a series of interviews with officials in London and Brussels conducted between 2017 and 2018, Filipa and Benjamin identify several inhibitors of rational decision-making that shaped the UK’s approach to Brexit negotiations, including a reliance on ill-fitting analogies based on past experiences and the exclusion of key sources of reliable information for decision-makers. Filipa and Benjamin conclude that “evidence from the Brexit case suggests adaptation and learning may be more difficult to achieve even in situations of high policy salience, since assumptions become ‘locked in’ and discrepant evidence cast aside.”