Krzysztof Przybyszewski

Cognitive Consequences of Political Loyalty

ABSTRACT There is much evidence for the fact that people do not modify their political beliefs when confronted with new data. The concept of predecisional distortion of information was applied in the study to determine whether people distort the information itself or the global judgements. A second focus of the study was on the influence of quality of information and cognitive effort put in distortion process. Loyal supporters of rightist and leftist political parties were presented with the same information attributed either to the candidate from their favourite party or to their political opponent varying on the level of ambiguity. It was found that loyal opponents always displayed robust distortion on the level of global evaluations. However, the distortion on the level of assimilation of new data was present only when information was ambiguous enough to be manipulated. It was also found that this process induces much more effort in making the evaluation.

The Impact of Mathematical Competences and Cognitive Effort on the Appearance of the Framing Effect

Abstract The aim of this paper is to check whether mathematical competences influence some manifestations of bounded rationality. A special example of bounded rationality called “framing effect” is dealt with to analyze empirically the thesis that mathematical competences and cognitive effort may reduce the framing effect. Two kinds of cognitive effort: probabilistic and deductive are analysed. Experiments were conducted using samples of Polish students, both mathematically and business oriented. As an example of a framing situation an example called “Asian disease”, (the first analyzed and the most popular example of the framing effect), is considered. The thesis that a mathematical background may diminish the occurrence of the framing effect was partly confirmed.

Approval Voting as a Method of Prediction in Political Votings. Case of Polish Elections

Applications of approval voting to political analyses are conducted. Polish 2015 presidential and parliamentary elections are considered. A question regarding voting by approval voting method was included in the voting polls. Experiments deal with polls over representative samples and give a possibility to predict a winner of the second round of presidential elections and those parliamentary coalitions which may be approved by groups of voters supporting the given parties.