Whether to Kill. Stephanie Dornschneider
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Название: Whether to Kill
Автор: Stephanie Dornschneider
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Зарубежная психология
isbn: 9780812292015
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In Chapter 4, I describe how I constructed cognitive maps from the interviews and how I identified the three main components of cognitive maps from the direct speech of the individuals—beliefs, belief connections, and decisions. Since they are constructed from direct speech, these cognitive maps are not immediately comparable. Accordingly, I employed Spradley’s theme analysis to abstract the beliefs of different individuals into more general categories. I show how I constructed a coding scheme, which consists of several dozen categories. The scheme identifies five broad sets of factors related to political violence and speaks to the analytical framework presented in this Introduction. It shows that the reasoning processes of violent and nonviolent individuals are surprisingly similar, and that there are no significant differences between Muslims and non-Muslims who engage in violence. Rather, the reasoning processes of all individuals primarily rely on beliefs about the state environment. There are also extraordinarily few beliefs about violent groups and about the individuals’ personality. There is no evidence that violent individuals suffer from mental illnesses or act based on a “terrorist personality.”
Chapter 5 presents the computer program and analysis of the cognitive maps. In more than 100,000 runs, the analysis identifies ten mechanisms related to political violence (five mechanisms) and nonviolent activism (five mechanisms). These mechanisms show that both violent and nonviolent individuals act in self-defense by responding to the belief that the state is aggressive. More specifically, this belief is so significant that individuals who hold it may decide to take up arms even if they believe the state is stronger than they are, and that they will suffer severe consequences from engaging in violence. This belief may also encourage nonviolent individuals to make decisions, even if they do not believe their activity will have any effect on state aggression. Nonviolent individuals may further be motivated by the belief that there is economic deprivation in their direct environment—a motivation usually attributed to violent individuals.
In Chapter 6, I show how the program can be applied to study counterfactuals. In more than 100,000 runs, the analysis investigates alternative worlds in which violent individuals would not have taken up arms. Individuals would not have decided to take up arms had they not believed their state was aggressive, and the majority would not have decided to engage in nonviolent activism in the absence of beliefs about state aggression. By contrast, a few nonviolent individuals would have been motivated to make decisions in alternative worlds by the belief that their state was not religious. Confirming that Islam is not found to explain violence, no violent individual would have continued making a decision based on this belief.
In the Conclusion, I reconsider the results and comment on the utility of applying the cognitive mapping approach in the particular field of political violence and political science more generally. In addition, I share what I as a German woman experienced going to Egypt and conducting interviews with violent and nonviolent individuals. I also give a few personal reactions to returning to Egypt for this research, after having lived in Cairo as a student of political science and Middle East studies from 2004 to 2007. I end by commenting on the changed lives of the individuals in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.
Chapter 1
A Cognitive Mapping Approach to Political Violence
Cognitive maps identify the reasoning processes by which human beings decide to engage in certain behavior. Representing a large range of factors, they capture the complex “subjective reality” that motivates people to behave in certain ways (Renshon 2008: 822). In political science, cognitive mapping has been a valuable approach to explore policy decisions. However, applications have been widely abandoned because cognitive maps are highly complex: typically, they contain reasoning processes that consist of more than a dozen beliefs and connections between beliefs.
This abandonment is unfortunate because cognitive mapping has at least two major advantages. First, it overcomes the gap between human behavior and the structures in which humans act. This is achieved by modeling human behavior as decisions that are motivated by beliefs about various types of internal factors (for example, feelings of fear) or external factors (for example, conditions of poverty). Second, as indicated by increasing applications of cognitive mapping in other disciplines, such as computer science, engineering, economics, and medicine, the approach allows systematic investigation of the mechanisms underlying human behavior. Specifically, these mechanisms are modeled as direct and indirect connections between beliefs and decisions for actions (chains of beliefs).
As noted in the Introduction, to cope with the complexity of cognitive maps, this book presents a computational model formalizing cognitive maps into directed acyclical graphs (DAGs). This formalization is based on Pearl’s theory of causality (2000). It provides new possibilities not only for the application of cognitive mapping but also for the study of counterfactuals. Specifically, the model enables the researcher to (1) systematically identify beliefs that motivate, or fail to motivate, decisions to engage in certain behavior; (2) systematically trace chains of beliefs that encourage certain decisions; and (3) explore counterfactuals, which show what would have prevented people from deciding to engage in certain behavior.
To study counterfactuals, the model intervenes on the belief systems of political actors and examines their behavior in alternative worlds following from this intervention. This allows us to explore alternative worlds in which the individuals would not have decided to take up arms (Chapter 6). Intervening on the actors’ beliefs about the world rather than on the world itself, this analysis bridges the gap between actors and political structures. This presents a new approach to the study of counterfactuals (cf. Fearon 1991; Sylvan and Majeski 1998; Tetlock and Belkin 1996), and is to my knowledge the first application of cognitive mapping to the study of counterfactuals.
This chapter is dedicated to introducing the cognitive mapping approach, the formalization of cognitive maps into DAGs, and its application to the study of counterfactuals. The first section introduces the cognitive mapping approach, and presents the main components of cognitive maps: beliefs, belief connections or inferences, and decisions for actions. The second section presents the formalization of cognitive maps, following Pearl’s theory of causality, and its application to counterfactuals via external interventions.
Cognitive Mapping
According to Axelrod (1976: 8–9), the roots of cognitive mapping lie in at least four fields: (1) psycho-logic, (2) causal inferences, (3) graph theory, and (4) evaluative assertion analysis.1 While several researchers working in these fields have been political scientists, the first rigorous application of cognitive mapping to studies of political science was presented by Robert Axelrod in 1976 in Structure of Decision. It had the practical goal of helping policy-makers reach better decisions.
Cognitive maps are illustrations of belief systems. They consist of three major components, which I present in this chapter: (1) beliefs, (2) belief connections or inferences, and (3) decisions for actions. Specifically, cognitive maps visualize beliefs and decisions as text in circles, and belief connections as arrows. Beliefs are located in circles that also have arrows pointing away from them.2 Decisions are located in circles that only have arrows pointing toward them.3 The following figure shows an excerpt from a cognitive map that I constructed for this research.
As I show below, cognitive maps allow the researcher to systematically trace chains of beliefs that are antecedent to decisions. These chains represent the complex microlevel mechanisms underlying human behavior, СКАЧАТЬ