Recent research in political psychology and biopolitics has begun to incorporate theory and methods from cognitive neuroscience. The emerging interdisciplinary field of political neuroscience (or neuropolitics) is focused on understanding the neural mechanisms underlying political information processing and decision making. Most of the existing work in this area has utilized structural magnetic resonance imaging, functional magnetic resonance imaging, or electroencephalography, and focused on understanding areas of the brain commonly implicated in social and affective neuroscience more generally. This includes brain regions involved in affective and evaluative processing, such as the amygdala, insula, anterior cingulate, and orbitofrontal cortex, as well as regions involved in social cognition (e.g., medial prefrontal cortex [PFC]), decision making (e.g., dorsolateral PFC), and reward processing (e.g., ventral striatum). Existing research in political neuroscience has largely focused on understanding candidate evaluation, political participation, and ideological differences. Early work in the field focused simply on examining neural responses to political stimuli, whereas more recent work has begun to examine more nuanced hypotheses about how the brain engages in political cognition and decision making. While the field is still relatively new, this work has begun to improve our understanding of how people engage in motivated reasoning about political candidates and elected officials and the extent to which these processes may be automatic versus relatively more controlled. Other work has focused on understanding how brain differences are related to differences in political opinion, showing both structural and functional variation between political liberals and political conservatives. Neuroscientific methods are best used as part of a larger, multimethod research program to help inform theoretical questions about mechanisms underlying political cognition. This work can then be triangulated with experimental laboratory studies, psychophysiology, and traditional survey approaches and help to constrain and ensure that theory in political psychology and political behavior is biologically plausible given what we know about underlying neural architecture. This field will continue to grow, as interest and expertise expand and new technologies become available.
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Political Neuroscience: Understanding How the Brain Makes Political Decisions
Ingrid J. Haas, Clarisse Warren, and Samantha J. Lauf
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Political Partisanship as a Social Identity
Leonie Huddy and Alexa Bankert
Partisanship remains a powerful influence on political behavior within developed and developing democracies, but there remains a lively debate on its nature, origins, and measurement. In this debate, political scientists draw on social identity theory to clarify the nature of partisanship and its political consequences in the United States and other developed and developing democracies. In particular, social identity theory has been used to develop an expressive model of partisanship, which stands in contrast to an instrumental model grounded in ideological and policy considerations. Included here are a discussion of the key motivational and cognitive components of social identity theory and an explanation of how the theory can be applied to the study of partisanship. The focus is on the measurement of partisanship, its social nature, its origins in convergent identities, and its ability to generate strong emotions and drive political engagement. Lastly, areas for future partisanship research are discussed. These areas include the study of negative partisan identities, coalitional identities in multiparty systems, and the political situations in which expressive and instrumental aspects of partisanship are most common.
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Political Psychology of Foreign Policy
David Houghton
For over 60 years, scholars of international relations (IR) and foreign policy have focused intermittently on the psychology of leaders and decision-makers in general, but attention has waxed and waned. Within political science, interest in the psychology of foreign policy seems to have peaked in the early 1970s and mid-1980s, but it would be quite mistaken to think of the topic as somehow passé. Since that time, the work of Irving Janis on groupthink (to cite just one instance) has proved repeatedly useful. That approach has focused on the social psychology of foreign policy, although more attention has been directed in recent years toward individual or cognitive psychology. Cognitive consistency theory, schema theory, and analogical reasoning have all particularly influenced the field, and each continues to provide the analyst with vital clues as to why people make the decisions that they do.
The methodology of studying foreign policy psychologically has also undergone significant change. Reacting to the strongly positivist focus typified by James Rosenau, a more recent generation of scholars have become rather more eclectic and dynamic in their approach to studying how foreign policy is made. This generation has also produced an extraordinary range of theories, discussed in this article, which depart from or significantly modify the well-known Rational Actor Model (RAM) of state and leadership behavior. Prospect theory, and poliheuristic theory in particular, have come onto the scene in recent years. Most recently, a welcome and much-needed turn toward the study of emotion (as opposed to merely cognition) has been especially evident in the study of the psychology of foreign policy.
It has never been clear exactly where foreign policy theory fits within IR theory, and it has often been treated as an addendum to studying IR—and even an element of unnecessary complexity—rather than being absolutely central to what we study. Indeed, the study of foreign policy decision-making (FPDM) has acquired a reputation as a discipline that is merely “marking time.” But this perspective on the psychology of foreign policy is as wrong as it is analytically dangerous. Attempts to create IR and foreign policy theories that conspicuously leave out psychological variables—or that simply “assume away” how real individuals actually behave—have proven repeatedly insufficient and have led to marked changes in the way that psychology is treated within the study of foreign policy. Most notably, the rise of constructivism and the failure of overly systemic theories like neorealism to account for foreign policy outcomes have caused neoclassical realists to deliberately incorporate the psychology of decision-makers into their theories. Within the discipline of psychology, meanwhile, a whole new field called behavioral economics that rejects the simplifying assumptions of a rational choice perspective has sprung up in recent years. In short, knowledge of psychology has proved invaluable to those attempting to understand why leaders make the decisions they do, and the entire approach remains indispensable to those who study foreign policy in general.
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Popular Understanding of Democracy
Doh Chull Shin
How well do people around the world understand democracy? Do they support democracy with an informed understanding of what it is? To address these questions, which have largely been overlooked in the literature on democratization, the World Values Survey and three regional barometer surveys are analyzed according to a two-dimensional notion of democratic knowledge. Their analyses reveal that a vast majority of global citizenries especially in post-authoritarian and authoritarian countries are either uninformed or misinformed about the fundamental characteristics of democracy and its alternatives. These findings contradict the popular theses that democracy is emerging as a universal value and it is also becoming the universally preferred system of government. For much of the world today, democracy represents little more than an appealing political symbol that still retains authoritarian practices.
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Prejudice and Religion
Jolanda van der Noll
Many studies have established that religious people display higher levels of prejudice. The review of the literature suggests, however, that in order to understand the relationship between religion and prejudice, it is important to consider the target of prejudice as well as the multifaceted nature of religion. Regarding the target of prejudice, some prejudices may be condemned in religious communities, whereas others may be perceived to be promoted by religious communities. Religion as a multifaceted construct encompasses social, moral, cognitive, and emotional aspects. In its relations with prejudice, the social and cognitive dimension are particularly relevant, as these dimensions determine who is considered to be an in-group member and what constitutes a threat to the own religious worldview. Furthermore, it has also been shown that the exposure to religious concepts influences prejudicial reactions. Finally, a review of the studies conducted outside the context of white Christians in North America and Europe shows that, regardless of social context and religious denomination, prejudice can to a large extent be explained by perceptions of threat, for example, to one’s belief system, which may especially be important for religious people.
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Priming in Political Judgment and Decision Making
Chadly Stern
How do people make political judgments and decisions? Each day, people are faced with a host of political issues. They also possess a limited amount of cognitive resources and must grapple with topics on which there is not necessarily an objectively correct answer. In turn, people rely on accessible information to facilitate their political judgments and decisions. Information is accessible when it is activated in a person’s mind. The information can either be chronically accessible, such as the political issues that are consistently important to a person, or made accessible through the situation, such as the issues that the media choose to cover in a given time and place. Situational information becomes especially accessible when the context activates available information stored in memory or the information is consistent with a person’s motivations and goals, such as media coverage rendering civil rights more accessible for racial minorities. Priming refers to the usage of accessible information when making judgments and decisions, such as deciding whether to sign a petition or how to vote in an election. In recent years, considerable debate has emerged about the generalizability of findings and current conceptual models of accessibility and priming across people and contexts. As research on accessibility and priming progresses, scholars continue to examine these topics in novel areas (e.g., social media) and push in building nuanced theoretical frameworks that help to explain variability in priming across contexts. Overall, understanding how people use accessible information in political judgments and decisions stands as an important factor in developing a comprehensive picture of political life.
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Pro-Government Militias and Conflict
Sabine C. Carey, Neil J. Mitchell, and Adam Scharpf
Pro-government militias are a prominent feature of civil wars. Governments in Ukraine, Russia, Syria, and Sudan recruit irregular forces in their armed struggle against insurgents. The United States collaborated with Awakening groups to counter the insurgency in Iraq, just as colonizers used local armed groups to fight rebellions in their colonies. A now quite wide and established cross-disciplinary literature on pro-government nonstate armed groups has generated a variety of research questions for scholars interested in conflict, political violence, and political stability: Does the presence of such groups indicate a new type of conflict? What are the dynamics that drive governments to align with informal armed groups and that make armed groups choose to side with the government? Given the risks entailed in surrendering a monopoly of violence, is there a turning point in a conflict when governments enlist these groups? How successful are these groups? Why do governments use these nonstate armed actors to shape foreign conflicts, whether as insurgents or counterinsurgents abroad? Are these nonstate armed actors always useful to governments or perhaps even an indicator of state failure? How do pro-government militias affect the safety and security of civilians?
The enduring pattern of collaboration between governments and pro-government armed groups challenges conventional theory and the idea of an evolutionary process of the modern state consolidating the means of violence. Research on these groups and their consequences began with case studies, and these continue to yield valuable insights. More recently, survey work and cross-national quantitative research have contributed to our knowledge. This mix of methods is opening new lines of inquiry for research on insurgencies and the delivery of the core public good of effective security.
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The Progress and Pitfalls of Using Survey Experiments in Political Science
Diana C. Mutz and Eunji Kim
Survey experiments are now quite common in political science. A recent analysis of the number of mentions of this term in political science journal articles demonstrates a dramatic increase from 2000 to 2013. In addition, the term survey experiment has been picked up by many other disciplines, by researchers in a variety of different countries. Given the large number of survey experiments already published, the goal here is not to review the numerous excellent studies using this methodology, because there are far too many, spanning too many different topics. Instead, this juncture—marked by both progress and the proliferation of this method—is used to highlight some of the issues that have arisen as this methodological approach has come of age. How might research using this methodology improve in political science? What are the greatest weaknesses of survey experimental studies in this discipline to date?
The explosive growth of survey experiments in political science speaks to their popularity as a means of establishing causal inference. In his reflection on the origins of survey experiments, Paul Sniderman has suggested that their quick rise in popularity was due to two factors: a) their ability to meet expected standards of external validity within the discipline without sacrificing internal validity, and b) the lower marginal cost per study relative to studies that were representative national surveys. Collaborative data collection efforts such as the Multi-Investigator Project and Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS) made it possible for more scholars to execute population-based survey experiments at a lower cost per study than traditional surveys. Using shared platforms, researchers can execute many experiments for the price of one representative survey.
These explanations make perfect sense in the context of a field such as political science, where external validity traditionally has been valued more highly than internal validity. It may be surprising to younger colleagues to learn that, not all that long ago, experiments were deemed completely inappropriate within the discipline of political science, unless they were field experiments executed in the real world. Experiments involving interventions in naturally occurring political environments were deemed tolerable, but only political psychologists were likely to find experimentation more broadly acceptable due to their strong ties to psychology. In political science, survey experiments were a means of promoting experimental methods in an external-validity-oriented discipline. Survey experiments freed political scientists from college sophomores as subjects and promised that external validity need not be sacrificed for strong causal inference.
Times have obviously changed, and political scientists now embrace a much broader array of methodologies including both observational and experimental methods. This occasion provides an opportunity to re-evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of this innovative method, in theory and in practice.
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Progressive Christian Communities as Sites for LGBTQ Collective Action and Civic Behavior
Barrett Scroggs and Debra McKnight
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals have historically been considered non-religious. This disconnect has typically been due to the anti-LGBTQ stances that many religions have taken. However, as many Christian denominations begin to take more open and progressive stances on issues related to sexuality, gender, and identity, there are some in the LGBTQ community who desire and are able to reconcile their LGBTQ and religious identities. This is especially true for members of the LGBTQ community who grew up in Christian spaces. Prior research has explored LGBTQ participation in religious communities and has found that participation in these activities has positive implications for the well-being of the LGBTQ community. However, despite the growing number of Christian churches welcoming members of the LGBTQ community, the literature has not explored the implications for LGBTQ collective action and civic behavior within the context of progressive church communities.
Participation in social justice work, whether in formal or informal ways, can offer individuals an altruistic outlet to become actively involved in causes impacting the world around them. This social justice work may include attending a justice-themed rally, volunteering for an organization promoting equality, or engaging in dialogue with others to promote a justice-themed cause. Social justice work like this can be a form of activism, which has been found to be an important stage of LGBTQ identity development. Prior research has found that higher levels of minority group identification are associated with a higher likelihood of participation in collective action and that higher levels of church attendance are associated with higher levels of civic participation. The church has historically been a space for social justice behavior and thus can connect LGBTQ individuals to a deeper passion for social justice and civic behavior. Members of the LGBTQ community are able to reconcile their LGBTQ and religious identities. And through the connection to a church, they can engage in collective action connected to LGBTQ-related and other issues (e.g., women’s rights, the environment, poverty, immigration, and housing).
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Prospect Theory and Political Decision Making
Ferdinand M. Vieider and Barbara Vis
Prospect theory—a psychologically founded account of decision making under risk and uncertainty—revolutionized how economists and, later, political scientists thought about decision making under uncertainty. Conceptually, prospect theory is based on two central notions: reference dependence, which is the notion that the utility of outcomes is defined over changes in outcomes from a reference point instead of over absolute outcome levels; and likelihood dependence, which is the notion that people distort probabilities non-linearly when making a decision. Likelihood dependence gives rise to the possibility and certainty effects—changes in probabilities are given much more weight if they fall toward the probability endpoints than if they fall into intermediate probability ranges. Reference dependence gives rise to the reflection effect, predicting mirrored risk attitudes for gains and for losses; and to loss aversion, predicting that people display a disproportionate dislike for losses.
Prospect theory has been extensively applied in the literature on political decision making. Two observations stand out. One, some aspects, such as the reflection effect, have received considerably more attention than others, such as loss aversion or likelihood dependence. Two, there is a twin challenge arising from the combination of this selective modelling and ex post rationalization. A step-wise procedure may help making modelling approaches more principled and systematic. This could furthermore help predicting future decision making behaviour—an aspect that has been neglected in favour of fitting past data.
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Psychology of Crisis and Trauma
Ann Enander
The psychology of crisis and trauma is concerned with attitudes, reactions, and behaviors related to extreme events and conditions. Facing a crisis poses a number of challenges to the individual in terms of preparation, making sense of the situation, taking decisions, and coping with stress. Thus research on human reactions to crisis spans a broad range of theories and analytical frameworks. Traditionally there has been a strong focus on vulnerabilities and on the negative impacts of crises in terms of stress and traumatic responses. However, in the early 21st century research has increasingly moved toward investigating resilience factors and the ways in which people actually cope under extreme conditions.
Although the term crisis is often used as a general concept, the reality of critical events can vary widely, each posing particular challenges to those affected. This can be illustrated by examples from natural disasters, toxic incidents, and socially generated threats of violence and terror, where the psychological contexts of such events differ considerably.
While learning from the experiences of crisis events is important, research on human reactions does raise a number of practical and ethical issues of which the researcher needs to take heed.
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Psychophysiology in Political Decision-Making Research
Mathew V. Hibbing, Melissa N. Baker, and Kathryn A. Herzog
Since the early 2010s, political science has seen a rise in the use of physiological measures in order to inform theories about decision-making in politics. A commonly used physiological measure is skin conductance (electrodermal activity). Skin conductance measures the changes in levels of sweat in the eccrine glands, usually on the fingertips, in order to help inform how the body responds to stimuli. These changes result from the sympathetic nervous system (popularly known as the fight or flight system) responding to external stimuli. Due to the nature of physiological responses, skin conductance is especially useful when researchers hope to have good temporal resolution and make causal claims about a type of stimulus eliciting physiological arousal in individuals. Researchers interested in areas that involve emotion or general affect (e.g., campaign messages, political communication and advertising, information processing, and general political psychology) may be especially interested in integrating skin conductance into their methodological toolbox. Skin conductance is a particularly useful tool since its implicit and unconscious nature means that it avoids some of the pitfalls that can accompany self-report measures (e.g., social desirability bias and inability to accurately remember and report emotions). Future decision-making research will benefit from pairing traditional self-report measures with physiological measures such as skin conductance.
Article
Public Opinion Toward LGBT People and Rights in Latin America and the Caribbean
Enrique Chaux, Manuela León, Lina Cuellar, and Juliana Martínez
Important changes toward more acceptance of homosexuality seem to be occurring in many countries around the world. However, large differences exist between individuals, societal groups, countries, and regions in attitudes toward homosexuality. Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LatAmC) are not an exception in either of these trends.
More positive attitudes toward homosexuality in LatAmC countries and significant legal and political changes in favor of LBGT rights have been occurring in the region since the third wave of democratization in the 1980s. Nonetheless, there are important limitations to these advancements: they are highly uneven; they are fragile and likely to become targets of politically motivated public outrage; enforcement is irregular and often faces hostile resistance from the civil servants appointed to enact and uphold them; and LGBT individuals continue to face high levels of violence, making the region one of the deadliest for sexual and gender minorities, particularly trans women.
Analyses from two large surveys, conducted periodically in several LatAmC countries, which include questions about homophobic attitudes (the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study, or ICCS, and the Latin American Public Opinion Project, or LAPOP) show a clear historical pattern of increased acceptance toward homosexuality in most countries. They also reveal large differences between countries with high (e.g., Uruguay) or low (e.g., Haiti) levels of acceptance of homosexuality. Multiple variables are associated with these differences. In almost all countries, women and more educated, less religious, and more politically active participants show more positive attitudes toward homosexuality than men and less educated, more religious (especially evangelical) and less politically involved participants. The analysis of attitudes toward homosexuality in LatAmC shows that (a) change in attitudes at a large scale is possible and is occurring relatively fast in LatAmC; (b) some countries are greatly lagging behind in these changes, especially in the Caribbean; and (c) policies and programs are urgently needed in the region, not only to facilitate changes in those countries where homophobic attitudes are still very common, but also to consolidate changes that have already been occurring.
Article
Q Methodology in Research on Political Decision Making
Steven R. Brown
Q methodology was introduced in 1935 and has evolved to become the most elaborate philosophical, conceptual, and technical means for the systematic study of subjectivity across an increasing array of human activities, most recently including decision making. Subjectivity is an inescapable dimension of all decision making since we all have thoughts, perspectives, and preferences concerning the wide range of matters that come to our attention and that enter into consideration when choices have to be made among options, and Q methodology provides procedures and a rationale for clarifying and examining the various viewpoints at issue. The application of Q methodology commonly begins by accumulating the various comments in circulation concerning a topic and then reducing them to a smaller set for administration to select participants, who then typically rank the statements in the Q sample from agree to disagree in the form of a Q sort. Q sorts are then correlated and factor analyzed, giving rise to a typology of persons who have ordered the statements in similar ways. As an illustration, Q methodology was administered to a diverse set of stakeholders concerned with the problems associated with the conservation and control of large carnivores in the Northern Rockies. Participants nominated a variety of possible solutions that each person then Q sorted from those solutions judged most effective to those judged most ineffective, the factor analysis of which revealed four separate perspectives that are compared and contrasted. A second study demonstrates how Q methodology can be applied to the examination of single cases by focusing on two members of a group contemplating how they might alter the governing structures and culture of their organization. The results are used to illustrate the quantum character of subjective behavior as well as the laws of subjectivity. Discussion focuses on the broader role of decisions in the social order.
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Racial Prejudice, Racial Identity, and Attitudes in Political Decision Making
Ashley Jardina and Spencer Piston
A great deal of work in the domain of race and politics has focused on two phenomena: racial prejudice and racial solidarity. Scholarship on racial prejudice has primarily examined the nature and consequences of white racial animus, particularly toward blacks. In the latter half of the 20th century, in the post-Civil Rights era, scholars argued that racial prejudice had been transformed, as most whites rejected the belief that there were innate, biological differences between racial groups. Instead, whites came to embrace the belief that blacks did not subscribe to particular cultural values associated with the protestant work ethic. While these attitudes profoundly shape public opinion and political behavior in the United States, we suspect that there has been a resurgence in the belief that consequential biological differences between racial groups exist, and that biological racism is a growing force in American politics. Most of the development of work on racial consciousness has examined the effects of racial solidarity among racial and ethnic minorities on public opinion. Individuals’ psychological attachments to their racial group are an important element in American politics, and their importance may increase as the country becomes more racially and ethnically diverse.
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Racial Stereotyping in Political Decision Making
Ray Block Jr.
Simply defined, stereotypes are commonly-held beliefs about groups of people. Racial stereotypes are the widely shared perceptions that people have about certain social groups and the individuals who are members of those groups. To understand the large and growing literature on racial stereotypes, it is useful to organize this body of research by whether stereotypes are being explored as dependent variables or as independent variables. When the focus is on dependent variables, scholars investigate why racial stereotypes exist and how they work. Conversely, the work on stereotypes as independent variables emphasizes their influence on both attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Special attention should also be paid to the stereotypes that are often applied to people who exist at the intersections of multiple racial, ethnic, gender, and sexuality groups (for example, those attributed female and nonbinary persons of color).
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Rational Choice Theory in Political Decision Making
Scott H. Ainsworth
Rational choice theory builds from a very simple foundation. To wit: individuals are presumed to pursue goal-oriented behavior stemming from rational preferences. Rational choice theory benefits from the very precise formulations of its assumptions. Individual-level rationality is generally defined as having complete and transitive preferences. Both completeness and transitivity have precise, formal definitions. From complete and transitive preferences, one can develop utility function presentations reflecting those preferences. Utility functions have the advantage of establishing a measure and allowing one to assess attitudes toward risk. That is, utility functions can reflect risk acceptance, risk neutrality, or risk aversion.
Although some rational choice theorists focus on individual-level decision making, most rational choice theorists consider the ways in which individuals’ decisions are aggregated into some sort of social outcome or social preference order. The aggregation of individuals’ preferences occurs in both social choice and game theoretic models. Arrow’s theorem is the best-known result in social choice theory. Arrow showed that the rationality of individuals’ preferences could not be readily preserved at the group level when those individuals’ preferences were aggregated. That is, individual-level rationality does not ensure group-level rationality. Put slightly differently, irrationality at the group level cannot impugn rationality at the individual level. Other examples highlighting the difficulty of aggregating individuals’ preferences into a collective outcome abound. For instance, game theoretic presentations of the collective action problem highlight how individually rational decisions can lead to suboptimal outcomes.
Rational choice models have been used to model interactions in a wide array of political institutions. Rational choice models have been developed to tackle some of the most challenging concepts in the social sciences, even in areas long thought impenetrable to rational choice theorizing. For instance, concepts such as ideology or personal identification have typically been used as preestablished descriptors. In contrast to treating those concepts as extant descriptors, rational choice theorists have modeled the endogenous development of ideologies and personal identification. Given the complexity of social phenomena, the relative parsimony and the clarity of rational choice models can be particularly helpful. The usefulness of rational choice models stems from their parsimony and their applicability to a wide range of settings.
Article
Religious Communication and the Effects of Priming
Gwyneth McClendon
Despite predictions that urbanization, economic development and globalization would lead to the recession of religion from public life, populations around the world continue to be highly religious. This pattern holds in most parts of the Global South and also in some advanced industrial democracies in the North, including in the United States. In grappling with the influence (or lack thereof) of religion on political life, a growing body of literature pays attention to how clergy–congregant communication might shape listeners’ political attitudes and behaviors. Considerable debate remains as to whether clergy–congregant communication is likely to change political attitudes and behavior, but there is a greater consensus around the idea that exposure to religious communication can at the very least prime (that is, increase the salience of) certain considerations that in turn affect how people evaluate political issues and whether they participate in politics. Religious communication is more likely to exert a persuasive and a priming influence among those already inclined to select into the communication and when the source of the communication is credible. More research is needed on the duration of religious primes and on the effects of religious communication in different political and social contexts around the world.
Article
The Representativeness Heuristic in Political Decision Making
Sjoerd Stolwijk
The representativeness heuristic was defined by Kahneman and Tversky as a decision-making shortcut in which people judge probabilities “by the degree to which A is representative of B, that is, by the degree to which A resembles B.” People who use this cognitive shortcut bypass more detailed processing of the likelihood of the event in question but instead focus on what (stereotypic) category it appears to fit and the associations they have about that category. Simply put: If it looks like a duck, it probably is a duck. The representativeness heuristic usually works well and provides valid inferences about likelihood. This is why political scientists saw it as an important part of a solution to an enduring problem in their field: How can people make political decisions when so many studies show they lack even basic knowledge about politics? According to these scholars, voters do not need to be aware of all actions and opinions of a political candidate running for office. To make up their mind on who to vote for, they can rely on cues that represent the performance and issue position of candidates, such as the party they are affiliated with, their ranking in the polls, and whether (for instance) they act/appear presidential. In other words, they need to answer the question: Does this candidate fit my image of a successful president? The resulting low-information rationality provides voters with much confidence in their voting decision, even though they do not know all the details about the history of each candidate. Using heuristics allows relatively uninformed citizens to act as if they were fully informed.
Despite this optimistic view of heuristics at their introduction to the discipline, they originated from research showing how heuristic use is accompanied by systematic error. Tversky and Kahneman argue that using the representativeness heuristic leads to an overreliance on similarity to a category and a neglect of prior probability, sample size, and the reliability and validity of the available cue. Kuklinsky and Quirk first warned about the potential effect of these biases in the context of political decision-making. Current research often examines the effects of specific cues/stereotypes, like party, gender, race, class, or more context-specific heuristics like the deservingness heuristic. Another strand of research has started exploring the effect of the representativeness heuristic on decision-making by political elites, rather than voters. Future studies can integrate these findings to work toward a fuller understanding of the effects of the representativeness heuristic in political decision-making, more closely consider individual differences and the effects of different contexts, and map the consequences that related systematic biases might have.
Article
Risk Assessment: Prospect Theory and Civil–Military Affairs
Gregory Winger
Prospect theory is a behavioral theory that holds that human attitudes toward risk are not fixed but can shift dramatically based on how a decision is framed. Instead of assessing different options in the abstract, individuals form a point of reference and weigh decisions based on how the outcomes may impact that point. When a proposition is framed as a potential gain, individuals exhibit risk-averse behavior and prefer certain gains over potentially more lucrative gambles. Conversely, when an identical question is posited as a loss, people become risk acceptant and are willing to gamble on potentially significant losses rather than accept even modest setbacks. Since first gaining prominence through the works of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, prospect theory has provided a valuable analytical tool for analyzing political decision making. Within international relations, the theory has been leveraged to gauge individual leaders’ attitudes toward risk when making decisions under uncertain conditions. This approach has yielded keen insights into a diverse range of episodes and issues including economic reforms, crisis management, and casualty sensitivity. Prospect theory also holds significant potential within the field of civil-military affairs. Although political leaders and military commanders ostensibly serve national interests, each possesses distinct interests and responsibilities. This means that even when facing a similar situation, civilian and military leaders may assess the situation from contrasting frames of reference and consequently possess conflicting attitudes toward risk. Such situations will lead to competing policy prescriptions and engender civil-military conflict. Incorporating prospect theory into our analysis of civil-military affairs provides a valuable tool for identifying policy preferences within individual actors and explaining how different frames of reference and risk propensities can shape civil-military disputes.
