The Art of Analyzing Real Decisions – Different Approaches to the Psychological Dimension of Political Decision-Making

____Workshop concept

   ▐  The myth that public decision-makers such as politicians and civil servants are somehow better at making decisions than other humans is simply that – a myth.

   As everyone else, they operate on the basis of limited cognitive abilities, processing information selectively and utilizing cognitive shortcuts to arrive at decisions. They are "muddling through" their professional lives: sometimes happening to stumble across something that they think could work; sometimes they gambling and hoping that a certain event will not occur.

   The science of decision-making has much to say about how people arrive at decisions and under what circumstances this may happen. Naturally, such insights do extent to politicians and civil servants. Political Psychology, Behavioral Public Administration, and other related fields acknowledge this. At the same time, it seems that we have only begun to scratch the surface when it comes to explaining politics and policies on the basis of the individual characteristics of decision-making.

   How do we best research the mechanisms at play? How do we entangle mechanisms from environmental influences? How big is the gap between actual real-life decision-making processes and controlled experiments in researching the mechanisms? The workshop will focus on these, and related questions. The goal is to take stock of the different ways in which political decision-making can be researched in order to get a better understanding of the dynamics at work.

   We want to approach the interdisciplinary research problem of explaining political decision-making by bringing together researchers from different fields with different theoretical and methodological backgrounds. We aim to foster a debate about current research strategies as well as about possible additions and improvements to existing methods and theories. ◼


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___ Keynote

Michael Bang Petersen, Aarhus University

"Investigating the Psychological Processes Behind Political Attitudes"

Michael Bang Petersen is Professor at the Department of Political Science at the Aarhus University. His investigations focus on how the way modern citizens think about mass politics is shaped by the adaptive challenges of human evolutionary history.

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___Timetable

09 November 2017
16:00 - 18:00 FG1/00.06 Keynote by Michael Bang Petersen, Aarhus University

10 November 2017
09:00 - 16:00 FG1/00.06 Workshop

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___Organizers

<link en bagss members faculty lasse-gerrits>Lasse Gerrits, Chair for Political Science, in particular the Governance of Innovative and Complex Technological Systems, University of Bamberg

<link en bagss mirijam-boehme>Mirijam Böhme, Doctoral Fellow at the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences, University of Bamberg

Image Credits: © Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences