Those who study value conflicts have resisted rational choice approaches in the social sciences, contending that political conflict over cultural values is best explained by group loyalties, symbolic motives, and other "nonrational" factors. However, Chong shows that a single model can explain how people make decisions across both social and economic realms. He argues that our preferences result from a combination of psychological dispositions, which are shaped by social influences and developed over the life span.
Chong's book yields insights about the circumstances under which...

How do citizens faced with a complex variety of considerations decide whether or not to tolerate extremist groups? Relying on several survey-experiments, the authors identify and compare the impact on decision making of contemporary information, long-standing predispositions, and enduring values and beliefs. People react most strongly to data about a group's violations of behavioral norms and the implications for democracy of the group's actions. The authors conclude that democratic citizens should have a strong baseline of tolerance yet be attentive to and thoughtful about current...

This timely book describes and explains the American people's alleged hatred of their own branch of government, the U.S. Congress. Focus group sessions held across the country and a specially designed national survey indicate that much of the negativity is generated by popular perceptions of the processes of governing visible in Congress. But Hibbing and Theiss-Morse conclude that the public's unwitting desire to reform democracy out of a democratic legislature is a cure more dangerous than the disease.

This book explores how the everyday person reasons about nuclear strategy. James DeNardo's data reveal surprising patterns of thinking on basic issues from SDI, arms control, and proliferation to the end of the Cold War. His discovery that the amateur's strategic reasoning defies all conventional theories lays the groundwork for a new understanding of national security politics. His demonstration that professional strategists reason like novices--that we are all Amateur Strategists--challenges the intellectual foundations of modern deterrence theory, public opinion studies, and game theory.

Citizens and Politics: Perspectives from Political Psychology brings together some of the current 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 judgments, others to human cognition and reasoning. Still others focus on perceptions or basic political attitudes such as political ideology. Several demonstrate the impact of values on policy preferences. The collection features chapters from some of...

Impersonal influence is about how people are affected by their perceptions of the collective opinions or experiences of others--things such as the well-publicized results of opinion polls (in the case of others' opinions), or media's coverage of the collective experiences of others (such as the extent to which others are experiencing financial problems or are being victimized by crimes). Media content is particularly well suited to serving as a credible channel of information about large-scale collective phenomena. Coverage of the collective opinions (in the case of perceptions of social...