Political Judgments and Decisions

Political Judgments and Decisions is a crosslisted Cognitive Science/Social Science class taught by Philip Kelleher.

Course Description
This course will examine theories of political behavior and what recent research has revealed about how people make political judgments and decisions. Some of the questions the course will address are: How do people acquire and use information about political issues and candidates? In what ways do they use information selectively and employ strategies that simplify their decisions? What factors determine an individual's political beliefs, attitudes, and values, both at the level of the individual and at the level of the group? What are the advantages and disadvantages of different political systems and methods of voting? In attempting to answer these questions, we will consider the roles played by different information-processing strategies, emotion, ideology, social or group identity, the media, public opinion, and political institutions and the power structures they create. Students will complete a series of short assignments and a longer, final project. This course satisfies Division I distribution requirements.

Learning Goals

 * Project-based
 * Reading
 * Quantitative
 * Writing