Suchergebnisse

One of the more fruitful systematic approaches to the study of foreign policy views nations as information processors and explains foreign policy as a function of information and processing thereon. Much of such processing depends on the prior beliefs of decision makers, but for a variety of reasons these systems of prior beliefs are very difficult to analyze using "standard" empirical and modeling techniques. Computational modeling, including expert system technology, provides an alternative methodology that allows such analysis. I present Policy Arguer (POLI), an expert system model of U.S. foreign policy making in Asia. Poli has been very successful in reproducing actual U.S. responses to events in Asia from the 1950s. More important, POLI recreates policy debate in the form of the arguments and counterarguments used to justify policy alternatives. The model explains foreign policy outputs in terms of a complete process from foreign policy beliefs, through debate, to choice.

What are the fundamental causes of human behavior and to what degree is it intended, consciously controlled? We review the literature on automaticity in human behavior with an emphasis on our own theory of motivated political reasoning, John Q. Public, and the experimental evidence we have collected (Lodge & Taber, 2013). Our fundamental theoretical claim is that affective and cognitive reactions to external and internal events are triggered unconsciously, followed spontaneously by the spreading of activation through associative pathways that link thoughts to feelings to intentions to behavior, so that very early events, even those that are invisible to conscious awareness, set the direction for all subsequent processing. We find evidence in support of four hypotheses that are central to our theory: hot cognition, affect transfer, affect contagion, and motivated bias.

We propose a model of motivated skepticism that helps explain when and why citizens are biased‐information processors. Two experimental studies explore how citizens evaluate arguments about affirmative action and gun control, finding strong evidence of a prior attitude effect such that attitudinally congruent arguments are evaluated as stronger than attitudinally incongruent arguments. When reading pro and con arguments, participants (Ps) counterargue the contrary arguments and uncritically accept supporting arguments, evidence of a disconfirmation bias. We also find a confirmation bias—the seeking out of confirmatory evidence—when Ps are free to self‐select the source of the arguments they read. Both the confirmation and disconfirmation biases lead to attitude polarization—the strengthening of t2 over t1 attitudes—especially among those with the strongest priors and highest levels of political sophistication. We conclude with a discussion of the normative implications of these findings for rational behavior in a democracy.