Daniel Heradstveit’s research while affiliated with Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and other places

The authors conducted interviews with opinion-makers in Turkey in 2012 to explore the feasibility of cooperation between Turkey and Norway on issues of peacebuilding. Norway was viewed by respondents as a country with softpower capabilities and a focus on human rights, democratic values, and the rule of law. Some opinion-makers also emphasized that both countries have a similar position on Palestine, a pivotal issue in the Middle East. Obstacles to cooperation include the geographical distance between the two countries, the lack of common institutions, Norway's lack of experience with different ethnicities and faiths, Norway's failure to object to the 2005-2006 Danish cartoon scandal regarding Mohammed, Norwegian criticism of Turkey's policies toward the Kurds, and its imprisonment of dissidents without due process of law. Despite these issues, respondents expressed enthusiasm about future cooperation, and view Norway as a far better potential collaborator than any other European country, in part because it, like Turkey, is outside the EU but a member of NATO. The issue of trade-offs between Norway's use of soft power and its economic aspirations, namely oil investments in other countries, was also explored. The article concludes with a discussion of the possibility that increased cooperation between Turkey and Norway may give rise to "Turkophobia", an extension of "Islamophobia", a simplistic interpretative framework that rests on cultural misunderstanding and miscommunication.

This article describes the results of an in-depth interview study of Arab elites in the wake of the Gulf war, research that only partially supports a crucial finding of research on actor-observer differences in social attribution. Although the aggregated explanations of these Arab respondents were consistent with the predictions of the theory, the attributions of Iraq's behavior by Egyptian elites, and attributions of the Coalition's behavior by Moroccan and Tunisian elites were not fully consistent with the hypothesis. These results were interpreted to suggest the importance of distinguishing, in applications of attribution theory, between complex political situations and simple social situations, the perspective of actors versus observers, and cultural differences in discursive practices.

Using a discursive frame of meaning, Coleman's notions of the power and interests of actors in a collective decision-making process are reoriented to emphasize the power of competing understandings of a policy situation. The contribution of actors to the collective decision-making process has an impact through their association with various idea elements or discursive practices which comprise their cognitive maps. The performance of a computer simulation model of collective decision-making based on these assumptions is examined using cognitive maps and interview data collected from officials who participated in Norwegian oil policy decision-making. The simulation model produced a set of understandings that is more or less similar to the actual public debate on oil policy and a ranking of policy preferences that coincides with the actual decision to begin oil exploration in northern Norway.

The Operational Code and the Cognitive Map approaches focus on the thought pro cesses of the individual. Differences emerge m the operationalization of concepts from cognitive theory such as 'centrality' and 'consistency', and in the conceptualization of the dependent variable. In the research procedures the Cognitive Map approach builds into its model assumptions which are more subject for investigation in the Operational Code approach. The article discusses the predictive and explanatory validity of the two approaches, one concern being whether coded beliefs or concepts from documents or interviews give valid representations of the decision-makers' beliefs. It is con cluded that both approaches may increase our understanding of how psychological constraints affect decision-makers.

This article attempts to increase our understanding of cognitive processes of policy- making by reporting the application of a model of individual decision-making. The application of the model is based on cognitive maps obtained from interviews which were conducted with Norwegian oil policy officials before and after the Bravo blow out in Norway's Ekofisk oil field. A comparison of simulation results for two groups of policy officials, environmentalists and non-environmentalists, using the before and after cognitive maps suggests that the model is able to replicate adjustments that policy officials make in their thinking and choice behavior to accommodate perceptions of new events.