Highlights of 2011 - Institute for Policy Research - Northwestern ...

Politics, Institutions, AND Public Policy
analysis, he said. Manski points to the United Kingdom, where
agencies must state upper and lower bounds in assessing the
budgetary impact of a legislative proposal. He also suggests that
policy analysts and researchers use a layered analysis, to move
from weak, highly credible assumptions to stronger, less credible
ones, determining the conclusions that follow in each case.
This would help resolve the tension between the credibility and
power of assumptions and also improve the transparency of
policy discussions. The research project received funding from
the National Science Foundation.
The Politics of Motivation
cognitive anchors for jurors in
reaching their decisions on damages.
Although these recommendations are likely to be influenced
by the evidence presented at trial, no formal constraints
limit the amounts attorneys might suggest. One worry is that
the recommendations can mislead jurors. Studying the deliberations
of jurors in 31 cases involving 33 plaintiffs in which the
jury awarded damages, Diamond and her colleagues found that
jurors often perceive plaintiff ad damnums not only as irrelevant
but also as outrageous, and they view defense damage
suggestions as more legitimate estimates than plaintiff ad damnums.
Together, these findings suggest that extreme plaintiff ad
damnums might exert less unwarranted influence than critics
fear. The article appeared in Empirical Legal Studies. Diamond is
an IPR associate and Howard J. Trienens Professor of Law.
In their widely cited 2006 paper, “Motivated Skepticism in the
Evaluation of Political Beliefs,” political scientists Charles Taber
and Milton Lodge of Stony Brook University offer a powerful
case for the prevalence of directional reasoning that aims not
at truth, but at vindicating prior opinions. Taber and Lodge’s
results have far-reaching implications for empirical scholarship
and normative theory. Indeed, the very citizens often seen as
performing “best” on tests of political knowledge, sophistication,
and ideological constraint appear to be those who are the
most susceptible to directional reasoning. However, in a Critical
Review article, Druckman points out that while Taber and
Lodge’s study could be considered methodologically beyond
reproach, it could also substantially overstate the presence of
motivated reasoning in political settings. That said, the focus on
accuracy motivation has the potential to bring together two
models of opinion formation that many treat as competitors
and to offer a basis for assessing citizen competence.
Jury Deliberations and Damage Anchors
As part of her ongoing analysis of live jury deliberations in the
Arizona Jury Project, law professor
and psychologist Shari
Seidman Diamond and her colleagues
recently assessed how
juries arrive at a dollar amount in
awarding damages. Jurors often
cite determining the amount
as one of the hardest aspects
of the jury process. Many hardto-predict
values such as future
medical expenses or injuries
that lack market values, such as
pain and suffering, are difficult to
translate into reasonable compensation.
Attorneys are generally
permitted to offer recommendations
for damage amounts,
presenting potentially powerful
Male/Female Differences and
Similarities
Evolutionary psychologists and feminist psychologists are
locked in fierce debate over widely different interpretations
of the causes of sex differences and similarities. IPR social
psychologist Alice Eagly, James Padilla Chair of Arts and
Sciences, and her colleague Wendy Wood of the University
of Southern California continue their investigation into this
topic. In a special issue of Sex Roles devoted to the debate,
the co-authors trace the source of the mutual distrust of
feminist and evolutionary psychologists and suggest that the
two sides of the debate might be “mired in an old-fashioned
nature versus nurture dynamic.” Eagly and Wood urge their
colleagues to consider research by evolutionary scientists in
a wider range of scientific domains—beyond the realm of
psychology. As an example, they explain how they came to
develop their “biosocial constructionist” evolutionary theory,
which integrates human culture in both ultimate and proximal
causes of female and male behavior. Adequate theorizing
requires that feminists acknowledge the distant evolutionary
IPR social psychologist Alice Eagly introduces her co-author, University of Illinois at Chicago
professor Stephanie Riger, at a talk on how feminism has transformed the science of psychology.
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