Charles S. Taber

• PhD Political Science
• Provost at Kansas State University

Cambridge Core - International Relations and International Organisations - Problem Representation in Foreign Policy Decision-Making - edited by Donald A. Sylvan

This book is an appreciation of the long and illustrious career of Milton Lodge. Having begun his academic life as a Kremlinologist in the 1960s, Milton Lodge radically shifted gears to become one of the most influential scholars of the past half century working at the intersection of psychology and political science. In borrowing and refashioning...

What are the fundamental causes of human behavior and to what degree is it intended, consciously controlled? We review the literature on automaticity in human behavior with an emphasis on our own theory of motivated political reasoning, John Q. Public, and the experimental evidence we have collected (Lodge & Taber, 2013). Our fundamental theoretica...

In this commentary, we embed the volume's contributions on public beliefs about science in a broader theoretical discussion of motivated political reasoning. The studies presented in the preceding section of the volume consistently find evidence for hyperskepticism toward scientific evidence among ideologues, no matter the domain or contextand this...

We offer a theory of motivated political reasoning based on the claim that the feelings aroused in the initial stages of processing sociopolitical information inevitably color all phases of the evaluation process. When a citizen is called on to express a judgment, the considerations that enter into conscious rumination will be biased by the valence...

We argue that conflict over immigration largely concerns who bears the burden of cultural transaction costs, which we define as the costs associated with overcoming cultural barriers (e.g., language) to social exchange. Our framework suggests that the ability of native-born citizens to push cultural transaction costs onto immi-grant out-groups serv...

Human beings are consummate rationalizers, but rarely are we rational. Controlled deliberation is a bobbing cork on the currents of unconscious information processing, but we have always the illusion of standing at the helm. This book presents a theory of the architecture and mechanisms that determine when, how, and why unconscious thoughts, the co...

In the present article, we extend the notion of cultural threat posed by immigrants beyond its current conceptualization as symbolic, collective-level threats to American culture and identity. Instead, we argue that routine encounters with non-English-speaking immigrants cause many individuals to feel threatened because of real barriers to interper...

Our response to this symposium on our 2006 paper centers on three questions. First, what motivations exist in the political wild, and do our experimental manipulations realistically capture them? We agree that strong accuracy motivations are likely (but not certain) to reduce biases, but we are not at all confident that the real world supplies stro...

Citizens, especially those who are knowledgeable and care the most about politics, are motivated to defend their beliefs and attitudes in the face of discrepant information. These motivated biases strongly influence the way people think about health care policies and the politicians and parties that propose or attack these contentious policies. Thr...

Public opinion and the media form the foundation of the United States' representative democracy, and are the subject of enormous scrutiny by scholars, pundits, and ordinary citizens. This handbook takes on the big questions about public opinion and the media both empirical and normative focusing on current debates and social scientific research. Br...

A computational model of political attitudes and beliefs is developed that incorporates contemporary psychological theory with well-documented findings from electoral behavior. We compare this model, John Q. Public (JQP), to a Bayesian learning model via computer simulations of observed changes in candidate evaluations over the 2000 presidential ca...

Since the 1960s, overt measures have failed to turn up much racism in the American public. Racial stereotypes and labels once accepted as reality are now perceived by most Americans as offensive and inappropriate, and political policies of segregation and discrimination find little overt support. This shift in racial relations has led some scholars...

We report the results of an experiment designed to replicate and extend recent findings on motivated political reasoning. In particular, we are interested in disconfirmation biases—the tendency to counter-argue or discount information with which one disagrees—in the processing of political arguments on policy issues. Our experiment examines 8 issue...

We have previously demonstrated that subliminal (i. e., unnoticed) affective primes (smiley and frowning cartoon faces) influence the valence of thoughts that one recalls and these affect-elicited thoughts mediate the effect of the prior attitude on posterior attitude and on public policy evaluations (Erisen, Lodge, & Taber, 2008). We extend these...

We develop a computational model of political attitudes and beliefs that incorporates contemporary theories of social and cognitive psychology with well-documented findings from electoral behavior. We compare this model, John Q. Public (JQP), to a Bayesian learning model via computer simulations of empirically observed changes in candidate evaluati...

We review and evaluate a growing literature in social and political psychology on the ubiquity of unconscious thought processes and present a theoretical model, called John Q. Public (JQP), which seeks to explain how citizens form and express their political beliefs, attitudes, and choices. Our most revolutionary claims are that people are generall...

We propose a model of motivated skepticism that helps explain when and why citizens are biased-information processors. Two experimental studies explore how citizens evaluate arguments about affirmative action and gun control, finding strong evidence of a prior attitude effect such that attitudinally congruent arguments are evaluated as stronger tha...

Political science has long relied on explicit responses in order to understand what and how people think. New research in the cognitive sciences suggests that this reliance on conscious considerations provides but a partial picture of how citizens think and reason. Given the limitations of conscious working memory and the growing evidence that much...

With the advent of the political behavior movement in political science in the 1950s, in particular with the publication of The American Voter in 1960, beliefs, feelings, and behavioral dispositions were brought to center stage in the prediction and explanation of political behavior. In line with an implicit assumption of human rationality, the soc...

The perception of threat and the experience of anxiety are distinct but related public reactions to terrorism. Anxiety increases risk aversion, potentially undercutting support for dangerous military action, consistent with terrorists' typical aims. Conversely, perceived threat increases a desire for retaliation and promotes animosity toward a thre...

We report the results of three experimental tests of the “hot cognition” hypothesis, which posits that all sociopolitical concepts that have been evaluated in the past are affectively charged and that this affective charge is automatically activated within milliseconds on mere exposure to the concept, appreciably faster than conscious appraisal of...

John Q. Public, a computational model of political cognition which incorporates both cognitive and affective mechanisms, is employed as a voter facing political cam-paign information. A series of hypothetical, computa-tional experiments show that the model successfully re-produces a set of well-known empirical phenomena found in electoral research...

The recording of event-related potentials (ERPs) in the brain has allowed for a better understanding of human sensory and cognitive processing. This technique may also prove useful in studying implicit social attitudes and their effects on information processing. Here, ERPs were used in a study of “hot cognition” in the context of political concept...

We advocate for an experimental approach to the study of personality and politics. In particular, we propose an "interactionist" model of political behavior in which the cognitive and behavioral effects of dispositional variables are qualified by experimentally induced contexts. Our operating assumption is that the political effects of personality...

Citizens and Politics: Perspectives from Political Psychology brings together some of the research on citizen decision making. It addresses the questions of citizen political competence from different political psychology perspectives. Some of the authors in this volume look to affect and emotions to determine how people reach political judgements,...

This article compares and contrasts traditional mathematical models with computer simulations. The strengths and flexibility of algorithmic computational simulations are shown by "walking through" a program designed to investigate and extend understanding in one of the most enduring questions in social choice research—concerns over the frequency of...

International relations faces an important choice: whether to employ formal or empirical methods that simplify our analysis or to rely on descriptive realism at the expense of focus. Facing this dilemma, many scholars have opted for focused simplicity. When this leads to oversimplification, however, particularly when it leads us to ignore underlyin...

Computational modelling allows researchers to combine the rich detail of qualitative research with the rigour of quantitative and formal research, as well as to represent complex structures and processes within a theoretical model. After an introduction to modelling, the authors discuss the role of computational methods in the social sciences. They...

That individual preferences may he aggregated into a meaningful collective decision using the Condorcet criterion of majority choice is one of the central tenets of democracy. But that individual preferences may not yield majority winners is one of the classic findings of the social choice literature. Given this problem, social choice theorists hav...

The Policy Arguer ( POLI) is a working expert system model of U.S. foreign policy belief systems toward Asia. Expert systems—computer programs that imitate the behavior of human experts in constrained domains—have become a useful mode of inquiry for research problems in a number of the social sciences. POLI reproduces U.S. foreign policy outputs an...

A formal dyadic model of the arms acquisition process is developed and analyzed through computer simulation. A rational model produces behavior consistent with a powerful security dilemma. A spiral model, in which images of the opponent become more aggressive, sparking an arms race, emerges from the simulation for deterrent nations. In addition to...

One of the more fruitful systematic approaches to the study of foreign policy views nations as information processors and explains foreign policy as a function of information and processing thereon. Much of such processing depends on the prior beliefs of decision makers, but for a variety of reasons these systems of prior beliefs are very difficult...