Threat, Anxiety, and Support of Antiterrorism Policies

The perception of threat and the experience of anxiety are distinct but related public reactions to terrorism. Anxiety increases risk aversion, potentially undercutting support for dangerous military action, consistent with terrorists' typical aims. Conversely, perceived threat increases a desire for retaliation and promotes animosity toward a threatening enemy, in line with the usual goals of affected governments. Findings from a national telephone survey confirm the differing political effects of anxiety and perceived threat. The minority of Americans who experienced high levels of anxiety in response to the September 11 attacks were less supportive of aggressive military action against terrorists, less approving of President Bush, and favored increased American isolationism. In contrast, the majority of Americans who perceived a high threat of future terrorism in the United States (but were not overly anxious) supported the Bush administration's antiterrorism policies domestically and internationally.     

The Motivated Processing of Political Arguments

We report the results of an experiment designed to replicate and extend recent findings on motivated political reasoning. In particular, we are interested in disconfirmation biases—the tendency to counter-argue or discount information with which one disagrees—in the processing of political arguments on policy issues. Our experiment examines 8 issues, including some of local relevance and some of national relevance, and manipulates the presentation format of the policy arguments. We find strong support for our basic disconfirmation hypothesis: people seem unable to ignore their prior beliefs when processing arguments or evidence. We also find that this bias is moderated by political sophistication and strength of prior attitude. We do not find, however, that argument type matters, suggesting that motivated biases are quite robust to changes in argument format. Finally, we find strong support for the polarization of attitudes as a consequence of biased processing.

Pedagogical discourses of gender,peace, and equality: Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards

This article discusses a feminist critical discourse analysis research project of award-winning books of the Jane Addams Peace Association. Children’s books carry societal messages that are gendered, raced, and classed, with award-winning books carrying an additional message of exceptionality as they are viewed as deserving of attention. Thus, the discourses they circulate are important points of analysis. This research, using data from the Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards (focusing on books for older children – young adult literature), takes a feminist antimilitarist perspective to explore the sociocultural implications of children’s literature for education and learning. I examine research with respect to award-winning literature, define my theoretical framework of feminist antimilitarism, explain my methodology of feminist discourse analysis, and detail my findings. I conclude that the awards as a whole function pedagogically to define conflict in ways that privilege colonial discourses, with women represented in essentialist ways and inequality perceived as absent in the contemporary West.     

A Computational Model of the Citizen as Motivated Reasoner: Modeling the Dynamics of the 2000 Presidential Election

A computational model of political attitudes and beliefs is developed that incorporates contemporary psychological theory with well-documented findings from electoral behavior. We compare this model, John Q. Public (JQP), to a Bayesian learning model via computer simulations of observed changes in candidate evaluations over the 2000 presidential campaign. In these simulations, JQP reproduces responsiveness, persistence, and polarization of political attitudes, while the Bayesian learning model has difficulty accounting for persistence and polarization. We conclude that “motivated reasoning”—the discounting of information that challenges priors along with the uncritical acceptance of attitude-consistent information—is the reason our model can better account for persistence and polarization in candidate evaluations.     

Kumārila’s Buddhist

The pūrvapakṣa of the Śūnyavāda chapter of Kumārila’s Ślokavārttika (vv. 10-63) is the longest continuous statement of a Buddhist position in that work. Philosophically, this section is of considerable interest in that the arguments developed for the thesis that the form (ākāra) in cognition belongs to the cognition, not to an external object, are cleverly constructed. Historically, it is of interest in that it represents a stage of thinking about the two-fold nature of cognition and the provenance of the ākāra that is clearly more advanced than Dignāga but not quite as sophisticated as Dharmakīrti. In particular, although one may see an anticipation of Dharmakīrti’s famous sahopalambhaniyama argument in this text, it is not yet fully spelled out.