Elements of Reason: Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds of Rationality (Cambridge Studies in Public Opinion and Political Psychology)

Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 12/7/2000
EAN 9780521653299, ISBN10: 0521653290

Hardcover, 344 pages, 23.1 x 15.5 x 2.5 cm
Language: English

Many social scientists want to explain why people do what they do. A barrier to constructing such explanations used to be a lack of information on the relationship between cognition and choice. Now, recent advances in cognitive science, economics, political science, and psychology have clarified this relationship. In Elements of Reason, eighteen scholars from across the social sciences use these advances to uncover the cognitive foundations of social decision making. They answer tough questions about how people see and process information and provide new explanations of how basic human needs, the environment, and past experiences combine to affect human choices. Elements of Reason is written for a broad audience and should be read by anyone for whom 'Why do people do what they do?' is an important question. It is the rare book that transforms abstract debates about rationality and reason into empirically relevant explanations of how people choose.

1. Beyond rationality
reason and the study of politics Arthur Lupia, Mathew D. McCubbins and Samuel L. Popkin
Part I. External Elements of Reason
2. Shared mental models
ideologies and institutions Arthur T. Denzau and Douglass C. North
3. The institutional foundations of political competence
how citizens learn what they need to know Arthur Lupia and Mathew D. McCubbins
4. Taking sides
a fixed choice theory of political reasoning Paul Sniderman
5. How people reason about ethics Norman Frohlich and Joe Oppenheimer
6. Who says what? Source credibility as a mediator of campaign advertising Shanto Iyengar and Nicholas A. Valentino
7. Affect as information
the role of public mood in political reasoning Wendy M. Rahn
Part II. Internal Elements of Reason
8. Reconsidering the rational public
cognition, heuristics, and mass opinion James H. Kuklinski and Paul J. Quirk
9. Three steps toward a theory of motivated political reasoning Milton Lodge and Charles Taber
10. Knowledge, trust, and international reasoning Samuel L. Popkin and Michael A. Dimock
11. Coping with tradeoffs
psychological constraints and political implications Philip E. Tetlock
12. Backstage cognition in reason and choice Mark Turner
13. Constructing a theory of reasoning
choice, constraints, and context Arthur Lupia, Mathew D. McCubbins and Samuel L. Popkin.