The Theory and Practice of Foreign Policy Decision Making

Central to Alex George's work was a concern with the psychology of presidential decision making. Our analysis focuses on George's work at the intersection of leadership psychology and the psychology of judgment in the making of consequential foreign policy decisions, specifically those dealing with issues of war and peace. We begin with a review of the fundamental dilemmas of political decision making, focusing on the various factors that present challenges to leaders seeking to make high-quality decisions. We then move to an analysis of the nature of judgment and the ways in which it both shapes and is shaped by cognitive dynamics and conclude by examining a number of steps designed to help leaders avoid the most damaging blind spots of their own psychologies and cognitive biases.     

ThePrepared and Spontaneous Remarks of Presidents Reagan and Bush: A Validity Comparison for At-a-Distance Measurements

This paper examines the spontaneous and prepared remarks of Presidents Reagan and Bush in the domain of U.S.-Soviet relations at the end of the Cold War. The findings suggest thatm researchers should be cautious when drawing their sample frames, because scores gleaned from prepared remarks may contain systematic differences large enough to affect the workings of models using at-a-distance measurements. However, if the leader is involved in the preparation of speeches he or she delivers, then these prepared speeches typically are as valid an indicator of the leader's psychological variables as are spontaneous remarks from interviews. Context effects may be present for both cognitive and personal variables in remarks from spontaneous and prepared statements. Impression management, therefore, may be a bigger problem than authorship in assessing leaders at a distance.     

Characteristic patterns of word association responses in institutionalized elderly with and without senile dementia

This study examined the responses of 91 institutionalized elderly persons to the Goldfarb-Halpern Word Association Test (1981), Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 24, 233–246. Subjects with senile dementia evidenced a characteristic pattern of responses which included marked reduction of paradigmatic responses, no decrease in syntagmatic responses, and a marked increase in unclassifiable and multiword responses not previously reported in the literature. The declines and increases appeared linear and progressive with severity of dementia. The pattern was distinct from that of any other adult group previously tested with this tool. Institutionalized elderly subjects without senile dementia performed similarly to previously tested noninstitutionalized elderly. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.     

Differences in intelligence and automatic memory processes

Intelligence-related differences in memory have been viewed as dependent upon control rather than structural memory processes. A test of this notion was made by comparing retarded and nonretarded persons on a subject-paced continuous recognition memory task which was judged to be nonstrategic. The stimuli were computer-generated faces and words. Analyses of pacing rates and posttest interviews provided no consistent evidence for strategy use. Differences in memory between the retarded and nonretarded subjects were attributed to differences in automatic aspects of encoding.     

The relationships among cognitive development,locus of control,and gender

Research has shown that perhaps 50% of all adults in this country are not able to perform abstract reasoning tasks described as formal opertions in the Piagetian cognitive developmental framework. Abstract reasoning is related to an individual's ability to perceive contingencies between their actions and subsequent outcomes. This pattern is seen as crucial for the development of an internal locus of control. Fifty-eight male and female undergraduates completed the Rotter Internal-External scale and a Cognitive Developmental Level assessment. For women, a highly significant inverse relationship was demonstrated between cognitive developmental level and locus of control. Women with higher levels of cognitive development were more likely to be internal. For men, no such relationship was found. Such results suggest that locus of control develops differently in men and women.     

Between Addition and Difference: A Place for Religious Understanding in a World of Science

Among contemporary religious believers, some follow in the footsteps of Newton, allowing their religious understanding to fill in gaps left by the sciences. Others take a more Wittgensteinian approach, discretely separating religious from scientific ways of thinking. Because neither of these relatively irenic positions captures the important element of cultural reform that is prevalent in so much of the religious life of the past, George Lakoff's recent work in cognitive studies is used to suggest ways that religious ideas may be used to challenge and enrich scientific thought. A scrutiny of Richard Dawkins's biological analyses of human behavior reveals the distorting limitations of exclusively scientific understanding, thereby clearing conceptual space for genuinely religious values, actions, responsibilities, and forms of human life.     

Predicting career performance of physicians using the biographical inventory approach

Two critical problems face professional and technical schools and their admissions committees: (1) the criterion problem of defining what constitutes a “good” career practitioner, and (2) the predictor problem of assessing in advance which applicants to the various schools are most likely to become these “good” career practitioners (and not just good students). The present project, working with a 333 physician sample, was designed to establish such criteria and predictors in the field of medicine. Seven important composite and summary criteria were established and five of them were successfully predicted with cross-validities at levels beyond .40 and ranging as high as .56 by a 351-item biographical inventory. A triplecross validation item-analysis design was used.     

Retrieval processes in fifth graders and adults

This research was concerned with retrieval processes which underlie conceptual clustering. In a free recall task with categorized lists, fifth graders' and adults' retrieval was examined temporally by means of interword response times. List organization and retrieval cue factors were manipulated in order to assess the developmental relevance of an hypothesized three component retrieval model. The results indicated that both age groups used a qualitatively similar retrieval strategy, involving search for and decoding of higher-order memory units. Providing retrieval cues eliminated the category search component, but also increased the likelihood of exhaustive recall attempts under random presentation conditions. The results were discussed in terms of the inter-relationships between storage and retrieval strategies. Age-related differences in retrieval time were attributed to insufficient reorganization during input and failure to attempt to recall all of a category's members.