An experimental study of cognitive processes and information in political problem solving

In this article we report the results of a small group experiment which focused on the cognitive basis of small group decision-making. The data were collected by observing and video taping three person interactions revolving around the issue of how to deal with a large budget deficit of a mythical government. To study this topic we employed an information processing perspective in conjunction with three common descriptive frameworks of political decision-making: satisficing, muddling through and incrementalism. Since it is generally known that humans are limited information processors and these descriptive political decision-making frameworks generally assume that choosers will behave as limited information processors we wanted to determine the degree to which choosers were concerned with incoming information and how they blended this information with their prior beliefs and knowledge. A thematic coding scheme and Bales' interaction analysis were used in the coding of the interactions contained on the video tapes. The results supported the idea of humans as limited information processors. But the data also indicate that satisficing is a metaheuristic which leads choosers to ignore highly relevant information in favor of evoking latent preferences. Thus metaheuristics of this type seem to lack decision aids which would allow political decision makers to manage vast amounts of pertinent information.