People's recognition of political decision arguments

Abstract

In a previous research 235 political decisions were studied based on documentary material. One of the results of this study was that, given a decision maker's description of the problem, (i.e., the alternatives, probabilities and values of the outcomes), his choice could be predicted, even though he did not state the decision rule he used. Due to this incompleteness there is a question about whether the decision makers and their audiences really applied the decision rules which have been predicted. Therefore, this study investigated whether subjects in general understood the policians' problem structure and recognized the expected decision rule when presented with the information as the politicians provided. The results of the study showed that logically compelling choices were recognized by the subjects and that in clear situations the majority of the subjects specified the same rule as the one that was predicted. But if information was available which was not strictly necessary to derive the correct choice, they often ignored this information and specified a simpler rule.