Is Political Cognition Like Riding a Bicycle? How Cognitive Neuroscience Can Inform Research on Political Thinking

Our understanding of political phenomena, including political attitudes and sophistication, can be enriched by incorporating the theories and tools of cognitive neuroscience—in particular, the cognitive neuroscience of nonconscious habitual cognition (akin to bicycle riding). From this perspective, different types of informational "building blocks" can be construed from which different types of political attitudes may arise. A reflection-reflexion model is presented that describes how these blocks combine to produce a given political attitude as a function of goals, primes, expertise, and inherent conflict in considerations relevant to the attitude. The ways in which neuroimaging methods can be used to test hypotheses of political cognition are reviewed.     

Internal Reasons: Reply to Brady, Van Roojen and Gert

In an earlier paper I identified two desiderata of a theory of practical reasons which favour internalism, and then argued that forms of this doctrine which are currently on offer lose either one or the other in trying to avoid the conditional fallacy. Michael Brady, Mark van Roojen and Josh Gert have separately attempted to respond to my argument. I set out reasons why all fail.     

Duration-reduction of avoidance sessions as negative reinforcement

Five rats were exposed to a shock-postponement procedure in which responses on each of two levers initially had equivalent effects. After an initial training sequence that ensured at least some responding on each lever, an additional consequence was made conjointly operative on the previously less-preferred lever for each animal. Each response on this lever continued to postpone shock, but also reduced the session duration by one minute. The conjoint contingencies were operative until, through session-shortening responses and the passage of time, the session was scheduled to end in two minutes; during the final two minutes the session-shortening contingency was disabled while the shock-postponement contingency continued to be operative on both levers. When responding shifted to a predominance on the session-shortening lever, the conjoint contingency was shifted to the other lever; for four of the five rats this reversal was followed by two additional reversals. Two of the rats' responding showed clear, strong, and unambiguous sensitivity to the session-shortening contingency. The responding of two others was also systematically controlled by that contingency, but the effects were less clearcut. The fifth animal showed an initial shift when session-shortening was introduced, but its subsequent behavior proved insensitive to reversals of procedure. The results clearly indicate a sensitivity of behavior to events on a time scale quite distinct from that of immediate consequences. They also support an interpretation of avoidance sessions, considered in their entirety, as events whose contingent relationship to behavior can affect that behavior—even in the absence of stimuli that delineate those relationships. Finally, these results support an interpretation of aversively based conditioning within a broader context, analogous to the “open versus closed economy” interpretation of appetitively controlled behavior.     

The inter-domain among personality and cognition variables in people who commit murder

The inter-domain among personality (MMPI) and cognition (intelligence) variables in a sample of 137 males charged with first degree or capital murder was examined through canonical analysis. Race was included as a control variable. Two significant canonical correlations were found which contribute to an understanding of the relationship between personality and cognition in violent people. These variates were identified as Problem-solving Focus and Introspective Self-focus. Results also suggest that these inter-domain variates explain the relationship between personality and cognition variables to a greater degree for black murderers than for white murderers.     

Social networks,information-seeking,and the utilization of services

Voluntary participation by low-income and/ar high-risk populations in prevention-oriented human service programs is minimal and dropout rates are high. Examination of social networks as they relate to information-seeking and utilization behavior may provide a source of understanding. Two investigations are reported. The results of Study 1 indicate that high-risk referred women with denser networks attended fewer parent group sessions than did those whose networks were less dense and that the more contact a woman had with her kin, the fewer parent group sessions she attended. The results of Study 2 indicate that in a sample of low-income women participating in a supplementary food program, those women whose networks were characterized by lower density and less frequent kin contact were more likely to pursue professional child-rearing information and advice than women in denser, more kin-involved networks. In addition, a significant interaction between one's sense of competence as a parent and the structure of one's network was found to determine the overall frequency of information seeking.     

Distribution of visual attention over space

Subjects viewed 3 X 3 grids in which different subsets of the nine squares were designated as "figure," either by physical shading of those squares or by a verbal instruction to imagine those squares as shaded. The time taken by participants to respond "on" or "off" the figure was measured for single or multiple probe dots, which all appeared on or off the figural subset together, and which had already been shown to be equally detectable against shaded or unshaded squares and in all nine locations within the grid. In contrast to the set-size effect generally found in experiments on memory scanning, reaction time did not necessarily increase with the number of squares in the figural subset. Instead, the critical variable, which in previous research may often have adventitiously covaried with set size, was the spatial compactness of the subsets (as indexed by square-root-area over perimeter): Probes of less compact figures required more time to classify correctly. Subjects were evidently more successful in confining their attention to sets of mutually proximal items. Reasons are given for believing that this principle may also apply in the more abstract representational or semantic spaces that determine reaction times and errors in various other cognitive tasks.     

Aptitude Tests: Can We Predict Their Future?

Garcia, J. The Logic and Limits of Mental Aptitude Testing. American Psychologist, 1981, 36, 1172–1180. Hargadon, F. Tests and College Admissions. American Psychologist, 1981, 36, 1112–1119.     

The effect of mood and incentives on helping: Are there some things money can't buy?

Happy, guilty, and neutral mood states were induced in participants who were then provided with an opportunity to donate blood for free, to donate in exchange for $5, or to choose between donating for free or for $5. As expected, there was a significantly higher incidence of helping when subjects felt happy and guilty as opposed to emotively neutral. Contrary to predictions, helping was unaffected by the type of incentive (donate for $5, donate for free, choose $5/free) subjects were offered in interaction with their mood state. However, the type of incentive did seem to influence the postdonation emotions of subjects: Guilty subjects who donated for money felt significantly less guilty following donation than prior to it and happy subjects felt more self-altruistic (kind and generous) following donation when they helped for free. The results are discussed in terms of Cialdini's negative state relief model (for negative moods) and the intrinsic qualities of helping (for positive moods).