Methodological Themes and Variations

The future of civilization, perhaps of the human race, hinges on our ability to avoid nuclear war. This point has been made so repeatedly and occasionally so eloquently that it needs no amplification here (Dyson, 1984; Katz, 1982; Institute of Medicine, 1986; Sagan, 1983; Schell, 1980). The consensus, however, begins and ends on this point. There is wide disagreement on how likely nuclear war is, how such a war might occur, the forms it might take, and how it might best be prevented. Will nuclear war arise as the result of a conflict spiral between the nuclear superpowers—a self-reinforcing process driven by the tendency of each side to exaggerate the hostile intent of the other and to acquire ever more sophisticated weapons systems that increase the other side\u27s sense of vulnerability and motivation to strike first in a crisis? Will nuclear war arise as a result of the failure of deterrence—a failure to convince the other side that one has both the political will and military capability to resist encroachments on vital national interests ? Will nuclear war arise as a result of accident or miscommunication triggered by flaws in the command, control, and intelligence systems of the superpowers? Or has the casual role of the superpowers been overestimated? Will nuclear war arise from Third World conflicts of relatively remote relevance to U.S.-Soviet relations? And must nuclear war be an all-or-nothing proposition? Might limited nuclear wars periodically break out between particular powers or combinations of powers

Cognitive Biases and Organizational Correctives: Do Both Disease and Cure Depend on the Politics of the Beholder?

The study reported here assessed the impact of managers\u27 philosophies of human nature on their reactions to influential academic claims and counter-claims of when human judgment is likely to stray from rational-actor standards and of how organizations can correct these biases. Managers evaluated scenarios that depicted decision-making processes at micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis: alleged cognitive biases of individuals, strategies of structuring and coping with accountability relationships between supervisors and employees, and strategies that corporate entities use to cope with accountability demands from the broader society. Political ideology and cognitive style emerged as consistent predictors of the value spins that managers placed on decisions at all three levels of analysis. Specifically, conservative managers with strong preferences for cognitive closure were most likely (a) to defend simple heuristic-driven errors such as overattribution and overconfidence and to warn of the mirror-image mistakes of failing to hold people accountable and of diluting sound policies with irrelevant side-objectives; (b) to be skeptical of complex strategies of structuring or coping with accountability and to praise those who lay down clear rules and take decisive stands; (c) to prefer simple philosophies of corporate governance (the shareholder over stakeholder model) and to endorse organizational norms such as hierarchical filtering that reduce cognitive overload on top management by short-circuiting unnecessary argumentation. Intuitive theories of good judgment apparently cut across levels of analysis and are deeply grounded in personal epistemologies and political ideologies

An Empirical Inquiry Into the Relation of Corrective Justice to Distributive Justice

We report the results of three experiments examining the long-standing debate within tort theory over whether corrective justice is independent of, or parasitic on, distributive justice. Using a “hypothetical societies” paradigm that serves as an impartial reasoning device and permits experimental manipulation of societal conditions, we first tested support for corrective justice in a society where individual merit played no role in determining economic standing. Participants expressed strong support for a norm of corrective justice in response to intentional and unintentional torts in both just and unjust societies. The second experiment tested support for corrective justice in a society where race, rather than individual merit, determined economic standing. The distributive justice manipulation exerted greater effect here, particularly on liberal participants, but support for corrective justice remained strong among nonliberal participants, even against a background of racially unjust distributive conditions. The third experiment partially replicated the first experiment and found that the availability of government-funded insurance had little effect on demands for corrective justice. Overall, the results suggest that while extreme distributive injustice can moderate support for corrective justice, the norm of corrective justice often dominates judgments about compensatory duties associated with tortious harms

Disentangling Reasons and Rationalizations: Exploring Perceived Fairness in Hypothetical Societies

Political psychologists often treat explicit explanations for political views as rationalizations rather than reasons and favor unconscious motives and cognitive processes as the key determinants of political ideology. We argue that transparent-motive theories are often dismissed too quickly in favor of subterranean-motive theories. We devote this chapter to finding common methodological ground for clarifying, testing, and circumscribing the claims of both the transparent-motivational theorists and the subterranean-motivational theorists, and we pose a series of empirical questions designed to explore predictions that might provide evidence that justifications are not mere by-products of the functional imperative to defend the status quo but rather functionally autonomous constellations of ideas capable of independently influencing polic

Psychological Approaches

This article addresses the following question: Under what conditions, in what ways, and to what degree should various strands of theorizing at the international level — structural realism, institutionalism, constructivism — incorporate various categories of psychological theory? The article samples the diverse ways in which such interweaving of levels of analysis has either already begun or could be readily initiated given recent empirical and theoretical developments. The most promising candidates for conceptual integration are organized into four broad categories which identify: the appropriate boundary conditions for the applicability of clashing hypotheses within the structural-realist tradition; the factors that facilitate and impede the creation of international institutions and norm enforcement mechanisms within the institutionalist tradition; the factors that determine whether policy-makers and epistemic communities frame issues in terms of the logic of consequential action or the logic of obligatory action within the constructivist tradition; and the price that international relations theorists pay for placing a hedgehog-style premium on theoretical parsimony and the value of adopting a more flexible, foxlike, contextualist style in future theory-building exercises