POL SCI 120A Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Belief Perseverance, Sunk Costs, Fast Food Restaurant
Document Summary
Psychological approaches to explaining foreign policy: overview of basic assumptions, people have limited mental capacities. They cannot pay attention to everything at once: rationality is limited by constraints on attention and on memory, beliefs shape the way people interpret the world. The word is too complex and complicated to take in all at once. Selective attention: people generally only pay attention that supports their beliefs: helps to explain why the media doesn"t have a big affect on public opinion, conservatives was fox news and liberals watch cnn and. Msnbc: we notice info that supports what we already believe and we filter out info that contradicts what we believe. They deal with the dissonance by changing their beliefs, to make it consistent. The us is confirmed in its aggression and there"s no hope for reconciliation: ex: in 1953, when stalin died, his successors wanted to make amends with the us, they had overtures.
