Collaborative Research: Studying Information Processing in Political Science: Improving Infrastructure, Testing Theory

任何复杂的社会情境都会给认知能力有限的人类感知者带来远远超过他们所能处理和存储的信息。我们认为，研究感知、判断和决策的最佳方法是观察人们在做出判断或决策时所使用的过程--策略、推理和算法。我们已经开发出一种新的动态过程跟踪方法，是唯一适合于研究信息处理和决策在复杂的社会情况。我们已经使用的方法来检查选民的决策在一系列的研究，导致了重要的新见解。但这种方法可以用来检验几乎任何复杂社会情境下的判断和决策。然而，要做到这一点，需要从根本上修改动态过程跟踪系统的软件。驱动该系统的软件是在几年的时间里临时开发的，从来没有特别“用户友好”的与其他研究人员分享。 该项目将支持开发和测试一个网络系统，使其他人能够使用动态进程跟踪方法。 这个新项目将有管理和用户界面组件以及数据管理系统，该系统将能够复制我们以前实验中的所有操作，并扩展该项目的功能，以适应其他从事相关决策项目的社会科学家的研究需求。该软件完成后，将可供许多领域的研究人员使用，并将为设计项目提供基础，以提高我们对人们如何获取和使用信息进行决策的理解。虽然以前使用动态过程跟踪的研究几乎只集中在投票上，但新的用户友好环境将允许在广泛定义的大规模决策中测试问题，在一系列约束条件下进行精英决策，并且实际上将适用于在有限时间内在不确定性下做出决策的任何环境，随着民主在世界各地的传播，对于政治科学家来说，还有什么问题比公民如何做出投票选择更重要呢？ 该项目将有助于开发适用于21世纪世纪的新一代投票行为理论，并为研究界提供一种非常适合测试这些理论的新研究工具。 该项目将培训研究生和本科生的实验方法的价值（一般）和详细的过程跟踪信息更具体。 这项研究有意识地研究了种族多样化的选民和候选人，他们将在可以想象的未来成为美国政治中越来越重要的一部分。 这些研究的结果可以为决策者提供信息，使他们能够考虑解决社会问题的其他手段，并就如何解决这些问题征求公民的意见。

Any complex social situation will present cognitively limited human perceivers with far more information than they can possibly process and store. We argue that the best way to study perception, judgment, and decision making is to observe the processes - strategies, heuristics, and algorithms - people employ while they are making a judgment or decision. We have developed a new dynamic process tracing methodology that is uniquely suited to studying information processing and decision making in complex social situations. We have used the methodology to examine voter decision making in a series of studies that have led to important new insights. But this methodology could be used to examine judgment and decision making in almost any complex social situation. To do so, however, requires that the software underlying the dynamic process tracing system be radically revised. The software that drives the system was developed over several years on an ad-hoc basis and was never made particularly "user friendly" for sharing with other researchers. This project will support the development and testing of a web-based system that will make it possible for others to use the dynamic process-tracing methodology. This new program will have administrative and user interface components and a data management system that will be able to replicate all of the manipulations from our previous experiments, and extend the capabilities of the program to accommodate the research needs of other social scientists working on related decision-making projects. The software, when complete, will be accessible to researchers in many fields, and will provide a base for designing projects meant to enhance our understanding of how people acquire and use information in their attempts to make decisions. While previous studies using dynamic process tracing have focused almost solely on voting, the new user-friendly environment will allow tests of questions in mass decision making broadly defined, elite decision making under a range of constraints, and will in fact will be adaptable to any environment in which decisions are made under uncertainty, within a limited timeframe, and where information availability changes over time.As democracy spreads across the world, what question could be more important for political scientists to address than how do citizens make their vote choices? This project will help develop a new generation of theories of voting behavior suitable for the 21st century, and make available to the research community a new research tool ideally suited to testing those theories. The project will train both graduate and undergraduate students in the value of experimental methods (in general) and detailed process tracing information more specifically. The research consciously studies ethnically diverse voters and candidates who will become an increasingly important part of American politics over the conceivable future. The results of these studies can inform policy makers as they contemplate alternative means for addressing social problems and of obtaining advice from citizens on just how those problems should be addressed.