Contributions of Behavioural Decision Theory to Research in Political Science

Cet article aborde la question de l'application de la Théorie de la Décision Comportementale (BDT) à deux domaines de la recherche en Sciences-Politiques, le comportement électoral et les relations internationales. On commence par un bref survol de la BDT, puis on passe à ce qui n'est maintenant que l'amorce de l'exploitation de la BDT dans les Sciences-Politiques. Dans le premier exemple, notre intérêt est focalisé sur les décisions prises par le public et dans le second sur celles prises par les élites politiques, mais la distinction masse-élite peut se révéler secondaire par rapport aux situations dans lesquelles émergent les décisions électorales ou de politique étrangère. Dans la présentation de ces deux exemples, on tente de replacer l'investigation reposant sur les aperçus de la BDT dans le contexte plus vaste de la recherche dans ce secteur.
This paper discusses the application of behavioural decision theory (BDT) to two areas of political science research: voting behaviour and international relations. We begin with a brief overview of BDT, and then turn to what is now only the beginnings of the utilisation of BDT in political science. In the first instance we focus on decision making by the mass public, and in the second on decision making by political elites, but, as we shall see, the mass-elite distinction may not be as important as the different situations or contexts in which voting and foreign policy decisions are typically made. In both instances, we will try to put research relying on the insights of behavioural decision theory into a broader context of research in the field.     

On the Content and Structure of the Gender Role Self-Concept: Including Gender-Stereotypical Behaviors in Addition to Traits

The present study introduces a conceptualization of gender role self-concept that implies not only the commonly measured socially desirable expressive and instrumental traits (F+ and M+) but also feminine and masculine behaviors (FBehav and MBehav), and socially undesirable gender traits (F− and M−). Three different models were tested using structural equation modeling. For both men and women, F+ and FBehav load together on one dimension whereas M+ and MBehav load on a second dimension. F− and M− are conceptualized as independent dimensions that are mainly related to the cross-gendered latent factor. With the exception of these similarities, the self-concepts of men and women differed in several important aspects that point to a different meaning of gender roles for the two sexes.     

German Inflection: The Exception That Proves the Rule

Language is often explained as the product of generative rules and a memorized lexicon. For example, most English verbs take a regular past tense suffix (ask-asked), which is applied to new verbs (faxed, wugged), suggesting the mental rule "add - ed to a Verb." Irregular verbs (break-broke, go-went) would be listed in memory. Alternatively, a pattern associator memory (such as a connectionist network) might record all past tense forms and generalize to new ones by similarity; irregular and regular patterns would differ only because of their different numbers of verbs. We present evidence that mental rules are indispensible. A rule concatenates a suffix to a symbol for verbs, so it does not require access to memorized verbs on their sound patterns, but applies as the "default," whenever memory access fails. We find 21 such circumstances for regular past tense formation, including novel, unusual-sounding, and rootless and headless derived words; in every case, people inflect them regularly (explaining quirks like flied out, sabre-tooths, walk-mans). Contrary to the connectionist account, these effects are not due to regular words constituting a large majority of vocabulary. The German participle -t applies to a much smaller percentage of verbs than its English counterpart, and the German plural -s applies to a small minority of nouns. But the affixes behave in the language like their English counterparts, as defaults. We corroborate this effect in two experiments eliciting ratings of participle and plural forms of novel German words. Thus default suffixation is not due to numerous regular words reinforcing a pattern in associative memory. Because default cases do not occupy a cohesive similarity space, but do correspond to the range of a symbol, they are evidence for a memory-independent, symbol-concatenating mental operation.     

THE VALUE ORIENTATIONS OF CHINESE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN HONG KONG

The Rokeach Value Survey was used to measure the value orientations of a large sample of 927 Chinese university students in Hong Kong. Based on their ranking of 18 terminal and 18 instrumental values, it was found that the students tended to put greater emphases on personal and competency oriented values. Specifically, the four most important terminal values were true friendship, happiness, self-respect, and wisdom; and the four least important terminal values were social recognition, a comfortable life, salvation, and pleasure. The four most important instrumental values included responsible, courageous, intellectual, and capable; and the four least important instrumental values included imaginative, polite, obedient, and clean. Male students tended to be more concerned with personal, accomplishment, and competency related values; whereas female students were more attracted to family, moral, and more intrinsic kinds of values. This study also provided evidence on the validity of the Rokeach Value Survey measure. It was shown that the values in the Rokeach measure correlated significantly with similar values in Scott's Personal Values Scale, another value measure with multi-item rating scales. L'Echelle des valeurs de Rokeach a été utilisée pour déterminer les orientations de valeur d'un vaste échantillon de 927 étudiants universitaires chinois de Hong Kong. En se basant sur leur mise en rangs de 18 valeurs terminales et de 18 valeurs instrumentales, il a été observé que les étudiants avaient tendance à mettre plus d'emphase sur les valeurs personnelles et les valeurs d'orientation vers la compétence. Plus particulièrement, les quatre valeurs terminales les plus importantes étaient la véritable amitié, le bonheur, le respect de soi, et la sagesse; les quatre valeurs terminales les moins importantes étaient la reconnaissance sociale, une vie confortable, le salut et le plaisir. Les quatre valeurs instrumentales les plus importantes étaient définies par les termes responsable, courageux, intellectuel et capable; les quatre valeurs instrumentales les moins importantes étaient définies par les termes imaginatif, poli, obéissant et propre. Les étudiants mâles avaient tendance à être davantage concernés par les valeurs reliées à la personne, à l'accomplissement et à la compétence; par ailleurs, les étudiantes étaient davantage attirées par la famille, la moralité et par des valeurs de nature plus intrinsèque. Cette étude a également constitué une épreuve expérimentalle de la validité des mesures provenant de l'Echelle des valeurs de Rokeach. Il a été démontré que les valeurs mesurées par l'Echelle de Rokeach étaient significativement corretees avec les valeurs semblables de l'Echelle des valeurs personnelles de Scott, une autre façon de mesurer des valeurs en utilisant des modalités d'évaluation comprenant plusieurs items.     

The cold glow of success: Responses to social rejection as affected by attitude similarity between the rejected and chosen individuals

Studied the effects of attitudinal similarity between two males on reactions to social rejection by a female. Sixty-five male undergraduate students had met an attitudinally similar or dissimilar male confederate. Later a female confederate either chose or did not choose the male confederate as a work partner. Following that, measures designed to tap subjects affective state and self evaluations were administered. Two way interactions for affect and self evaluations (p < 0.01 and p 7lt; 0.05 respectively) indicate that, relative to a control group, only subjects whose similar male partner was chosen expressed unfavorable affect and self-evaluations. The relevance of these findings for the affective consequences of social comparison processes is discussed.     

Memory for the pitch of a tone

Observers attempted to detect the presence of a pitch dirference between two successive tones. The percentage of correct judgments was equivalent for tones separated by 95, 4.5, and 8.9 sec. There was a general increase in reports of a pitch difference with increased intertone interval, which is interpreted as arising from hypothesized shifts in the neural locus of the first stimulus during the intertone interval.     

Daytime naps improve motor imagery learning

Sleep is known to contribute to motor memory consolidation. Recent studies have provided evidence that a night of sleep plays a similar functional role following motor imagery (MI), while the simple passage of time does not result in performance gains. Here, we examined the benefits of a daytime nap on motor memory consolidation after MI practice. Participants were trained by MI on an explicitly known sequence of finger movements at 11:00. Half of the participants were then subjected (at 14:00) to either a short nap (10 min of stage 2 sleep) or a long nap (60–90 min, including slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep). We also collected data from both quiet and active rest control groups. All participants remained in the lab until being retested at 16:00. The data revealed that a daytime nap after imagery practice improved motor performance and, therefore, facilitated motor memory consolidation, as compared with spending a similar time interval in the wake state. Interestingly, the results revealed that both short and long naps resulted in similar delayed performance gains. The data might also suggest that the presence of slow wave and rapid eye movement sleep does not provide additional benefits for the sleep-dependent motor skill consolidation following MI practice.     

Perceived intergroup threat and attitudes of host community members toward immigrant acculturation

The authors expected the extent to which host community members (a) perceive immigrants as threatening, (b) believe that the immigrants are able to assimilate to the host community (permeability), and (c) consider their presence in the host community as legitimate to predict attitudes towards immigrant acculturation. The authors designed Study 1 to examine attitudes of Germans toward Turkish immigrants. Participants were 227 German white-collar and blue-collar workers. As expected, ethnocentric acculturation attitudes positively correlated with perceived threat and negatively correlated with perceived legitimacy and perceived permeability. However, only perceived threat contributed uniquely to the prediction of the attitudes. In Study 2, the authors applied an experimental manipulation of perceived threat. Before answering attitude questions, participants read magazine articles with a threatening, enriching, or irrelevant content. The manipulation had the predicted impact on the self-reported attitudes toward immigrants. However, the salience of threatening or enriching aspects of the Turkish culture did not affect implicitly measured attitudes.     

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