Cognitive Theory And Politics Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Many models of psychology have been applied to political attitudes and behavior. Psychodynamic models predominated in the early work of scholars such as Harold Lasswell, who sought to apply psychology to politics, and in psychobiographies such as the one conducted of Woodrow Wilson by Alexander and Juliette George. However, as such models were replaced in psychology by behaviorist and later humanist approaches, such analysis fell by the wayside. With the rise of cognitive psychology in the 1980s, new possibilities for application arose. The apex of cognitive theory reached its height in the early 1990s with the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman on judgment and decision making. This work reflected a reaction against both behaviorist models that rejected a role for the cognitive processes of the mind, and humanist approaches that privileged affect over thought. The growth and development of such models was potentiated by rapid technological advances offering previously unprecedented ways of accessing mental processes through increasingly precise reaction time tests; electroencephalogram readings, which provided accurate temporal measurements of mental processes; and perhaps reaching their height with the widespread use of function magnetic resonance imaging, which afford tremendous spatial accuracy in brain topography. Ironically, the introduction of this technology served to begin a reintegration of affective models with previously more exclusively cognitive ones.

Applications Of Cognitive Theory

Cognitive theories have been employed to help analyze and explain a variety of political phenomena. The most prominent of these have included models used to generate insight into problems related to framing, decision making, identity, and ideology. Cognitive theory has incorporated many elements, including work on memory, attention, perception, and abstract problem solving.

The work on judgment and decision making has proved most relevant to the central questions and problems posed by political scientists. The work on judgmental heuristics includes work on three kinds of biases that affect individuals’ assessments of probability, frequency, and likelihood. By and large, these cognitive shortcuts work efficiently and effectively to help organize the world, yet they can also lead to systematic and predictable biases in judgment. Representativeness encourages people to make evaluations based on similarity between a person or an event and the particular category to which it belongs. Robert Jervis has conducted work examining the effect of representativeness in decision making on foreign policy. Arguing against the experimental results based on real-world cases, Jervis argued that decision makers rely on base rate probabilities in rendering judgments about the future because such assessments allow them to make causal arguments to help direct their choices. Such inferences support and encourage theory driven interpretation of events. A second judgmental heuristic, called availability, demonstrates how estimates of likelihood become skewed by accessibility, including salience and recency effects. Anchoring constitutes the third heuristic, documenting how people fail to adequately adjust from often irrelevant anchors in evaluating probabilistic outcomes. Nancy Kanwisher provided clear illustration of how these heuristics, along with others, can help account for systematic and recurrent fallacies in U.S. national security policy, including providing an explanation for the domino theory and why policy makers incorrectly assume that deterrence entails matching forces. Kurt Weyland, applying these models in a comparative arena, has explored how heuristics affect policy diffusion in such areas as health care reform in Latin American countries.

Cognitive Theory And Prospect Theory

Applications of cognitive theory to politics also include work on prospect theory, a psychological theory of decision making under conditions of risk. This model incorporates two phases. The first phases encompasses framing effects, which describe the way individuals shift the substance of their choices based on the order, method, or form of the presented options. This work has proved quite influential in analyses of survey research and investigations of the instability of question answers. The second phase of prospect theory relates to the way that people choose among options once these prospects have been framed; this work suggests that individuals prove more prone take risks when confronting losses than when facing gains. Prospect theory has most commonly been used in political applications to examine decision making in the realm of international relations, including explorations of the Iranian hostage rescue mission and the Cuban missile crisis. Additional work has also applied prospect theory in the arena of comparative politics to look at public policy choices among Latin American leaders under conditions of crisis.

Cognitive Theory And Identity

Other applications of cognitive theory to politics include work on identity. Cognitive models form one of the bases for defining the content of identity, by providing ideas around which to structure expectations of behavior and preferences. Such cognitive models can provide a consensus around which actor expectations can converge by providing representative stereotypes for exemplar members to embody and represent. Scholars Michael Stone and Roblyn Young have used the content of belief systems to measure the nature of collective identities among Iraqi leaders. In this way, cognitive models can help define and measure the way individual choices among competing identities can aggregate into a cohesive sense of collective identity.

Cognitive Theory And Ideology

Cognitive models have also been employed to inform our understanding of ideology by examining the way voter beliefs, attitudes, and opinions can influence choice. Sometimes this work invokes demographics such as party identification, which can also incorporate an affective dimension. Cognitive theory can inform the mechanisms people use to adopt particular ideologies by examining the consistency between their beliefs and actions, as cognitive dissonance theory does; this model too assimilates a motivated component. Theories concerning right-wing author itarianism, or other belief structures that can inform political ideology, often similarly depend on either implicit or explicit models of cognition.

As psychology has moved into a more integrated understanding of the way the human brain processes political information and coalition politics, the bifurcation of cognitive and affective models in psychology will continue to diminish. As this occurs, the application of cognitive theory to politics should begin to reflect the intertwined nature of thought and feeling in driving political actions and decisions.

Bibliography:

Jervis, Robert. 1986. “Representativeness in Foreign Policy Judgments.” Political Psychology 7, no. 3 (1986): 483–505.
Kahneman, Daniel, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky. Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Kanwisher, Nancy. “Cognitive Heuristics and American Security Policy,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 33, no. 4 (1989): 652–675.
McDermott, Rose. “The Psychological Ideas of Amos Tversky and Their Relevance for Political Science.” Journal of Theoretical Politics 13, no. 1 (2001): 5–33.
Weyland, Kurt. Bounded Rationality and Policy Diffusion: Social Sector Reform in Latin America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.