Eugene Borgida

FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND ISSUE VOTING: DO PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES "WALTZ BEFORE A BLIND AUDIENCE?"

VWhile candidates regularly spend much time and effort campaigning on foreign and defense policies, the thrust of prevailing scholarly opinion is that voters possess little information and weak attitudes on these issues, which therefore have negligible impact on their voting behavior. We resolve this anomaly by arguing that public attitudes on foreign and defense policies are available and cognitively accessible, that the public has perceived clear differences between the candidates on these issues in recent elections, and that these issues have affected the publics vote choices. Data indicate that these conclusions are appropriate for foreign affairs issues and domestic issues.

On the Relationship Between Attitude Involvement and Attitude Accessibility: Toward a Cognitive-Motivational Model of Political Information Processing

A model of the relationship between attitude involvement and attitude accessibilitywas developed and tested. The model specifies that attitude involvement leads to selective(biased) issue-related information-gathering strategies, which in turn produce extreme andunivalent (unambivalent) attitudes. Finally, attitudes associated with univalent and extremeunderlying structures should occasion relatively little decision conflict and thus should be highlyaccessible. Questionnaire response data gathered in a national telephone survey and from twosamples of undergraduates revealed that both attitude extremity and attitude ambivalence onselected political issues mediated the relationship between attitude involvement and attitudeaccessibility. Some findings indicated that selective processing mediated the relationshipbetween attitude involvement and attitude extremity and ambivalence. Discussion focuses on theprocesses linking involvement to accessibility, the factors that moderate theambivalence-accessibility relationship, and the relevance of the model to media-based primingeffects and tothe nature of public opinion and the survey response.

Does expert psychological testimony inform or influence juror decision making? A social cognitive analysis

The authors examined whether expert testimony serves an educational or a persuasive function. Participants watched a simulated sexual abuse trial in which the child witness had been prepared for her testimony (i.e., she was calm, composed, and confident) or unprepared (i.e., emotional, confused, and uncertain). The trial contained different levels of expert testimony: none, standard (i.e., a summary of the research), repetitive (i.e., standard testimony plus a 2nd summary of the research), or concrete (i.e., standard testimony plus a hypothetical scenario linking the research to the case facts) testimony. Repetitive testimony bolstered the childs testimony, whereas concrete and standard testimony did not. Concrete testimony sensitized jurors to behavioral correlates of sexual victimization; standard and repetitive testimony desensitized jurors to these correlates. Implications for the use of procedural innovations in sexual abuse trials are discussed.

INDIVIDUAL AND CONTEXTUAL VARIATIONS IN POLITICAL CANDIDATE APPRAISAL

Tn this note we elaborate on the conditions under which on-line and memory-based strategies of political candidate evaluation can be implemented. We suggest that the structure of information . may be an important contextual variable affecting the voters choice of these strategies. In addition, we propose that citizens with less political sophistication are particularly sensitive to structural differences in the political information environment. We use an experimental design that manipulates the information-processing context to test these ideas. Our results suggest that the context in which information is presented plays a critical role in moderating the influence of individual differences in political sophistication.

Personal Involvement and Strategies for Making Contingency Judgments: A Stake in the Dating Game Makes a Difference

To examine the relation between degree of involvement in a task and the complexity of strategy a subject applies to the task, we randomly assigned 48 female university volunteers to either a dating condition (high-involvement) or one of two (low-involvement) control conditions. These subjects performed a covariation judgment task for which the likelihood of their using simple or complex strategies was calculated. High-involvement subjects used more complex strategies and tended to be more accurate. These data are discussed in terms of the functionality of human information processing, heuristic analyses of inference strategies, and the importance of considering level of personal involvement in analyses of task performance.

The relationship of national and personal issue salience to attitude accessibility on foreign and domestic policy issues

Research on issue voting indicates that the impact of a given attitude on the candidate appraisal process depends on its personal importance or salience (e.g., Krosnick, 1988). In the present research, we suggest that salient attitudes may be more influential because they are more cognitively accessible in memory relative to less salient attitudes. Results based on within-subject, between-issue comparisons indicate that individuals have more accessible attitudes toward issues that are highly salient to them than toward issues that are relatively less salient. Results also indicate that attitude accessibility is more closely associated with the personal importance of an issue than with the perceived national importance of an issue. Finally, in applying this accessibility analysis to the debate on the relative electoral influence offoreign versus domestic issues, we find that attitudes on the latter are more accessible and more likely to arouse self-interest. Discussion focuses on developing process models of political cognition and behavior, and on the utility of accessibility theory in providing insights into these processes.

Developing the science base for reducing tobacco harm.

The University of Minnesota Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center has been examining the multiple dimensions and the scientific evidence required to determine the feasibility of tobacco harm reduction as a means to reduce tobacco-related mortality and morbidity. Because of the complexity associated with exploring this area, an interdisciplinary approach is necessary. The research components that have been of particular focus at our center include (a) developing and validating biomarkers of tobacco-related exposure and toxicity, (b) developing animal models and designing studies with humans to assess a variety of smoking reduction approaches and potential reduced exposure products, and (c) determining individual differences in response to these interventions and products. A description of the ongoing activities and challenges in these areas is provided, along with projected directions for the future.

Sexual Harassment: An Experimental Test of Sex-Role Spillover Theory

This experimental study examined the ways in which knowledge of a womans occupation type influenced how different types of sexual harassment were perceived. A total of 53 male and 58 female undergraduates were asked to evaluate six scenarios describing three types of harassment (unwanted sexual attention, gender harassment, and sexual coercion) at two levels of severity (nonphysical and physical) toward women in two different types of occupations (traditional and nontraditional). The results indicated that participants were less likely to perceive incidents of sexual coercion as harassing when a woman is in a nontraditional occupation. The results also provided evidence of a perceptual gap between men and women for incidents of unwanted sexual attention and gender harassment but not for incidents of sexual coercion. Results provide support for the sex-role spillover model of sexual harassment proposed by Gutek. Theoretical and legal implications of this research are discussed.

Can Values Moderate the Attitudes of Right-Wing Authoritarians?

This investigation explored how right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and endorsement of egalitarian beliefs may interact to determine attitudes toward immigrants, homosexuals, and African Americans. Study 1 (N = 239) found that RWA was negatively related to evaluations of immigrants for those who weakly endorsed egalitarian beliefs. In contrast, endorsement of egalitarian beliefs was associated with positive evaluations of immigrants for both low and high RWAs. RWA did not interact with egalitarianism to determine attitudes toward homosexuals or African Americans. Study 2 analyzed data from the 1992 National Election Study and replicated these effects in a young adult (age= 24) sample (n = 102) using moral traditionalism as a proxy for RWA. Partial support for the hypotheses also was found in the adult (age= 25) sample (n = 1,257). It is concluded that when tradition and/or social norms offer unclear positions, endorsement of egalitarian beliefs influences the attitudes of authoritarians.

The importance of trust and community in developing and maintaining a community electronic network

Focusing on two rural cities in Minnesota, this paper analyses ways in which these communities have gone about providing information technology to their citizens. This paper will explain why one city has chosen to take an entrepreneurial approach to networking and the other city has chosen a more collaborative approach, promoting equal access for its citizens. Based on interviews, focus groups, and surveys in the two cities, we find that these divergent approaches are related to fundamental cultural differences in the two communities. One city seems to have a more pronounced reservoir of social capital, meaning that people in this community tend to be more trusting, have more cohesive social ties and are prone toward collaboration. Cooperation and social trust, particularly among community leaders, seem to have played large roles in triggering the development of a community electronic network. Moreover, we discover that political engagement and interpersonal trust among the citizenry in this city seem to be pivotal in sustaining and perpetuating the community endeavor.