Cognitive Toolbox
We’ve put together a powerful toolbox for problem-solving in the political world. The sections below are intended to give you a sense of what we do and where it comes from.
Brain Science
Every technique used at Cognitive Policy Works is informed in some way by the workings of the brain. Scientists who study the structures and processes in our brains have made great strides in the last few decades. We now know the fundamentals of how learning and memory work. In politics, the ways that our brains match patterns in the world to past experiences has a profound impact on how new situations are interpreted.
It is now widely accepted that emotions play a vital role in effective reasoning, a finding that calls into question any strategy that seeks to “inform” citizens in dispassionate ways. Similarly, the foundations for empathy—the glue that binds people together—are becoming clear. Human beings are not the self-interest maximizers proclaimed by popular economic models.
Our brains don’t simply “represent” the world as is. Instead, our senses take in information from the outside world and structure it according to the circuits that splice, compile, and combine into coherent scenes the features of the world that appear to be most relevant for our survival. An important consequence of this vastly complex phenomenon is that most of what we call conscious thought is structured outside our awareness.
Cognitive Linguistics
Language is a window into the structure of our thoughts. Advances in the study of language have shown that many of the same cognitive mechanisms are involved in language and thought. These mechanisms arise in the workings of our brains and are typically not accessible to conscious introspection.
The words we use do not simply map onto the world in a literal way. Instead, words evoke networks of concepts that make sense in the contexts that arise around them. Thought structures—called “frames”—reveal the various roles and relationships that make sense of the words we use. Metaphors bridge the logic of our bodily experiences to the abstract concepts of our thoughts. The categories that parse our world into manageable packets introduce rich structures that give preference to some notions and neglect others.
The study of language allows us to see how stereotypes work and why they are always present in our reasoning. It offers insight into the strategic blunders that come with uncritical acceptance of someone else’s words. And it offers the possibility of consciously choosing language that resonates deeply and authentically with the feelings we have about political issues.
Decision Research
Starting in the mid-1970’s a group of psychologists set out to discover how human decision-making differs from the standard assumptions of “rational action” in economics. Their pioneering efforts lead to the creation of several fields of research exploring risk perception, affect (feelings of “goodness” or “badness”), moral judgment, heuristics for selecting among different options, and more. This body of work has revealed a series of tendencies that clearly demonstrate how inadequate the notion of rational choice is for explaining economic behavior. The same implications apply to political behavior.
At Cognitive Policy Works we draw upon the insights of decision research to develop strategies for effective decision-making that are grounded in the workings of real human minds. Our goal is to replace the faulty presumptions of outdated philosophies with concrete knowledge of the mechanisms that shape how decisions are made in the world. Self-knowledge in this regard is vital for taking what great thinkers do naturally every day and transforming it into teachable skills for the rest of us.
Social Psychology
Much has been learned about how the mind works inside each of us. Yet it is the features of our minds that take shape in the larger social worlds of our lives that make one politics different from another. This social dimension of our minds, what you might call the public space of political thought, bridges our brains to the cultural influences that have such profound consequences across geographic regions and cultural groups.
Building upon the fact that emotions help us reason, we can start to see how the ethics of different political world views are coherent across distinct political communities. At the same time, it allows us to see the unique sensibilities of individuals that explain how close members of the same family can diverge in their political expressions.
Our work is grounded in many branches of psychology, especially those that focus on cognition, human development, and emotions. The synthesis of these research endeavors allows us to start to put together a comprehensive picture of political cognition. It is this “big picture” that informs all that we offer to the political world.
