Nehemia Geva

The influence of positive affect on acceptable level of risk: The person with a large canoe has a large worry

Abstract A study investigated the influence of positive affect, induced by receipt of a small bag of candy, on risk preference and on thoughts about losing. Results indicated, compatibly with previous findings, an interaction between affect and level of risk: Where stakes were high, persons in whom positive affect had been induced, in comparison with those in a control group, set a higher level of probability of winning as the minimum necessary for taking the bet. Where stakes were low, persons in the positive-affect condition tended to be more risk prone (to set a lower probability level) than control subjects. Results of a thought-listing task paralleled those of the risk measure, indicating an interaction between affect condition and risk level, such that persons in the positive-affect condition contemplating a high-stakes bet, but not those considering a low-stakes bet, reported more thoughts about losing than control subjects.

The Effect of Dynamic and Static Choice Sets on Political Decision Making: An Analysis Using the Decision Board Platform

Previous studies of political decision making have used only “static” choice sets, where alternatives are “fixed” and are a priori known to the decision maker. We assess the effect of a dynamic choice set (new alternatives appear during the decision process) on strategy selection and choice in international politics. We suggest that decision makers use a mixture of decision strategies when making decisions in a two-stage process consisting of an initial screening of available alternatives, and a selection of the best one from the subset of remaining alternatives. To test the effects of dynamic and static choice sets on the decision process we introduce a computer-based “process tracer” in a study of top-ranking officers in the U.S. Air Force. The results show that (1) national security decision makers use a mixture of strategies in arriving at a decision, and (2) strategy selection and choice are significantly influenced by the structure of the choice set (static versus dynamic).

A Foot in the Door: An Experimental Study of PAC and Constituency Effects on Access

A between-groups experimental design tests the hypothesis that PACs have an advantage over constituents in gaining access to members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Sixty-nine congressional staffers participated in an exercise designed to simulate the process by which scheduling decisions are made. The study was conducted in Washington, DC, in the fall of 1996. Analysis of variance reveals a significant constituency main effect, but no significant PAC main effect. That is, requests associated with a PAC are not significantly more likely to be granted access than those not associated with a PAC, whereas requests from constituents do have a significant advantage in gaining access.

The Cognitive Calculus of Foreign Policy Decision Making

The cognitive calculus theory of foreign policy decision making is an attempt to bridge the gap between two research orientations in the international relations literature: outcome validity and process validity. The cognitive calculus theory models the mental calculations of foreign policy decision making with the premise that an individual conducts the decision-making process and the model should therefore represent his or her capabilities. An experiment tested a few of the models derivations concerning the effects of the quality of information on process and choice parameters. The results support major aspects of the cognitive calculus theory. Relevant items are attended to more carefully than irrelevant items and speed up the decision process. Furthermore, the valence of the relevant items disposes the choice of a corresponding option. The consequences of plugging the information set used in the experiment into the mathematical model of cognitive calculus show that human behavior parallels the models predictions.

Mathematical models of foreign policy decision-making : compensatory vs. noncompensatory

There are presently two leading foreign policy decision-making paradigms in vogue. The first is based on the classical or rational model originally posited by von Neumann and Morgenstern to explain microeconomic decisions. The second is based on the cybernetic perspective whose groundwork was laid by Herbert Simon in his early research on bounded rationality. In this paper we introduce a third perspective — thepoliheuristic theory of decision-making — as an alternative to the rational actor and cybernetic paradigms in international relations. This theory is drawn in large part from research on heuristics done in experimental cognitive psychology. According to the poliheuristic theory, policy makers use poly (many) heuristics while focusing on a very narrow range of options and dimensions when making decisions. Among them, the political dimension is noncompensatory. The paper also delineates the mathematical formulations of the three decision-making models.

Teachers’ and School Children’s Stereotypic Perception of “The Child of Divorce”

The main purpose of the present study was to investigate how teachers’ and schoolmates’ judgments of a child’s academic, emotional, and social functioning are influenced by the knowledge that his or her parents are divorced. One hundred four teachers and 120 seventh- and eighth-grade students were shown the same film of a child engaging in a variety of activities. The target child was introduced as either a boy or a girl and as living either with both parents or with a divorced mother. The results showed a more negative evaluation of the child of divorced parents by both teachers and students on all three judgment dimensions. The results also showed meaningful patterns of selective and inferential memory of the facts, which varied according to the subject’s beliefs as to the marital status of the target child’s parents.

The Emotional Calculus of Foreign Policy Decisions: Getting Emotions Out of the Closet

For the past five decades, students of foreign policy analysis and foreign policy decision making have labored to develop theories that explain international behavior. Focusing on the individual as the unit of analysis, these studies have proceeded under the assumption that the political decision maker is the driving force behind the perception, interpretation, evaluation, and response to international political events (Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin 2002). However, within this growing field of inquiry, little empirical research has contributed to a scientific understanding of how emotions influence foreign policy decision making. This is surprising not only given our intuitive understanding that emotions are an important part of the human experience, but also given a history of research devoted to understanding the impact of emotions on social behavior. It has only been within the past decade that any serious attempt has been made to understand how emotions such as anger, hate, compassion, and fear impact politics. To date, no program of scientific inquiry has sought to empirically investigate the effect of emotions on foreign policy perceptions, interpretations, and choices.

Information inconsistency and the cognitive algebra of foreign policy decision making

This paper explores a special feature of the information complexity that underlies foreign policy decision making, i.e., inconsistency in information. We use the actor and action images to categorize types of inconsistency. The consequences of inconsistency for process and outcome are analyzed within the framework of a cognitive algebra model. Finally, we demonstrate the implications of the model in an experimental study. Our findings show that not every inconsistency is detected and those that are detected do not always affect the choice. The critical inconsistency is the one that presents an imbalanced structure of the actor and the action image. This inconsistency affects the choices made by decision‐makers and sensitizes them to the within image inconsistency. Furthermore, the results suggests that in the context of the scenarios employed in this experiment the actor image has a more dominant status for the foreign policy decision making process than the action image.

Security Versus Liberty in the Context of Counterterrorism: An Experimental Approach

A critical question in counterterrorism studies concerns the extent to which governments adequately balance the continual provision of individual rights and freedoms with the appropriate level of national security when faced with a terrorist attack. We experimentally assess this tradeoff utilizing a 2 × 2 × 2 between-groups factorial design, manipulating (a) the extent of terror-related threats, (b) the level of invasiveness of subsequent counterterrorism policies, as well as (c) the terror context: transnational and domestic. The results provide evidence that the public is more willing to accept greater reductions in civil liberties under a greater threat of terrorism only when the perceived effectiveness of those policies to prevent future acts of terrorism is high. Furthermore, we find these results to be specific to the context of a transnational terror threat. This suggests that the public will be unwilling to accept reductions in civil liberties when the source of the attack is domestic, regardless of the level of threat or how effective subsequent policies may be in preventing future attacks.

Examining the Distinct Effects of Emotive Triggers on Public Reactions to International Terrorism

In recent years, a growing body of research has set out to examine the role that emotions play in shaping political attitudes and behaviors regarding terrorism. However, one major issue that is generally overlooked is whether the thematic relevance of emotive triggers leads to differential effects on peoples reactions to international terrorism. Specifically, does anger—regardless of its source—tend to drive people towards supporting an aggressive foreign policy option to counter terrorism, or do the thematic underpinnings of anger (i.e., the specific contents that trigger this particular emotion, such as watching a news story about a recent terrorist attack) matter vis-à-vis the policy choice? To address this gap, this study experimentally examines the impact of anger—induced by thematically relevant versus irrelevant emotive triggers—on peoples cognitive processing and foreign policy preferences regarding international terrorism. Overall, we find that the induction of anger via thematically relevant emotive triggers leads to a higher tendency for selecting a military option, a lower amount of information acquisition, and a shorter processing time in response to terror-related incidents.