In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

Strategic Behavior and Policy Choice on the U.S. Supreme Court. By Thomas H. Hammond, Chris W. Bonneau, and Reginald S. Sheehan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 299p. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. This book will almost certainly be a “must read” in classes on judicial politics and in seminars on American political institutions. The authors intentionally developed a very simple model, and so the book is accessible to, and appropriate for, undergraduates as well as graduate students without much formal-theoretic training. Despite the model's simplicity, the substantive topics that the authors engage with the model make it useful for graduate seminars, if only as a jumping-off point for motivating empirical tests or as a foil for the development of more sophisticated models.

Strategic Behavior and Policy Choice on the U.S. Supreme Court

Scoring Points: Politicians, Activists, and the Lower Federal Court Appointment Process

Harlan Fiske Stone—Pillar of the Law

Does the identity of a majority opinion writer affect the level of agreement a Supreme Court decision receives from the public? Using a survey experiment, we manipulate majority opinion authors to investigate whether individuals are willing to agree with Supreme Court opinions authored by ideologically similar justices even though the decisions cut against their self-identified ideological policy preferences. Our study provides insight into the extent to which policy cues—represented by a political institution’s policy messenger—affect agreement with a given policy. We find that a messenger effect indeed augments the level of agreement a given Supreme Court case receives.

Do Policy Messengers Matter? Majority Opinion Writers as Policy Cues in Public Agreement with Supreme Court Decisions

The manner in which political institutions convey their policy outcomes can have important implications for how the public views institutions’ policy decisions. This paper explores whether the way in which the U.S. Supreme Court communicates its policy decrees affects how favorably members of the public assess its decisions. Specifically, we investigate whether attributing a decision to the nation’s High Court or to an individual justice influences the public’s agreement with the Court’s rulings. Using an experimental design, we find that when a Supreme Court outcome is ascribed to the institution as a whole, rather than to a particular justice, people are more apt to agree with the policy decision. We also find that identifying the gender of the opinion author affects public agreement under certain conditions. Our findings have important implications for how public support for institutional policy-making operates, as well as the dynamics of how the Supreme Court manages to accumulate and maintain public goodwill.

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Naming Names: The Impact of Supreme Court Opinion Attribution on Citizen Assessment of Policy Outcomes

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During times of domestic turmoil, the use of force abroad becomes an appealing strategy to US presidents in hopes of diverting attention away from internal conditions and toward a foreign policy su...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/20531680211019904

Presidential use of diversionary drone force and public support

William Howard Taft was both our twenty-seventh president and the tenth Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court -the only person to have ever held both high positions in our country. He once famously commented that "presidents may come and go, but the Supreme Court goes on forever" (Pringle 1998). His remark reminds us that presidents serve only four-year terms (and are now limited to two of them), but justices of the Supreme court are appointed for life and leave a legacy of precedent-setting cases after departing the High Court. Of course, presidents also leave a legacy of important decisions, not the least of which being their appointment of federal judges. [excerpt]

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Scott S. Boddery

Papers

Do Policy Messengers Matter? Majority Opinion Writers as Policy Cues in Public Agreement with Supreme Court Decisions

Naming Names: The Impact of Supreme Court Opinion Attribution on Citizen Assessment of Policy Outcomes

Naming Names: The Impact of Supreme Court Opinion Attribution on Citizen Assessment of Policy Outcomes

Presidential use of diversionary drone force and public support

Courts and Executives