Recent constraint-satisfaction models of explanation, analogy, and decision making claim that these processes are influenced by bidirectional constraints that promote coherence. College students were asked to reach a verdict in a complex legal case involving multiple conflicting arguments, including alternative analogies to the target case. Participants rated agreement with the individual arguments both in isolation before seeing the case, and again after reaching a verdict. Assessments of the individual arguments (including the competing analogies) shifted so as to cohere with their emerging verdict. Information about the character of the defendant in the initial case triggered a cascade of "spreading coherence", influencing decisions made about a subsequent case involving very different legal issues. Participants ' memory for their initial positions also shifted so as to cohere with their final positions. The coherence shifts were simulated by a constraint satisfaction model. The results demonstrate that an alogical process of constraint satisfaction can transform highly ambiguous inputs into coherent decisions. Bidirectional Reasoning 3 One of the most deep-rooted assumptions about human reasoning is that the flow of

The O.J. Simpson “trial of the century ” in the mid-1990s captured the attention of the American populace more than any other public spectacle since the kidnaping of the Lindberg baby in the 1920s. A prominent football player and popular sportscaster was charged with a gruesome double homicide. The attorneys for the prosecution and defense were of various races and genders. The evidence presented on each side was at times amazingly simple, visual, and emotional, and at times was verbal, abstract, and probably incomprehensible to jurors. The witnesses included individuals of diverse styles, demeanors, and credibility. The jurors, the recipients of the messages from these various sources, were themselves a mixed group of people of diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and personal experiences who had to sift through the trial material and arrive at a decision as to whether the defendant had been proven guilty or not. The context in which all of this took place was at times tense and sad, and at times filled with humor and positive feelings. Not surprisingly, no experiment has ever captured the extraordinary complexity inherent in this situation, yet almost all of the variables present in this trial (and many not present) have been examined in the social psychological literature on attitude formation and change. This chapter provides an overview of research on these diverse variables and addresses the processes by which these variables are thought to result in influence. Although it has become a cliché to say that the attitude construct is the most indispensable concept in

Do MANAGEMENT COURSES in schools of library and information studies provide the necessary knowledge for born leaders to become great managers? What makes a good leader has recently been a hot topic in the literature. The conclusions reached have been that change is inevitable and how a leader responds to this change is the mark of how effective he or she will become. The focus of writings in this area is that knowledge about creativity, risk-taking, innovation, and intuition-key elements in the makeup of a successful manageris being successfully transferred to potential managers through the management courses being offered today in schools of library and information studies. The authors refute the conclusion that this transfer is happening successfully and infer that some curriculum changes are necessary to achieve this goal. It is suggested that an analytical model of leadership should be implemented in the curriculum to emphasize creativity, risk-taking, innovation, and intuition. The model would also include a discussion of these elements, their interdependence, the background of these elements, and their uses in the workplace.

Opinion pollsters, political scientists and democratic theorists have long been concerned with the normative and methodological implications of nonattitudes (Converse, 1964). Of the proposed remedies to the weak and labile attitudinal responses proffered by an uninformed and disinterested public, perhaps the most ambitious to date has been Fishkin’s concept of the deliberative poll (Fishkin, 1991; 1995; 1997). Combining probability sampling with information intervention and increased deliberation affords a unique insight into what might be considered the true ‘voice of the people’. Yet while deliberative polling draws heavily on the general notion of political sophistication (Luskin, 1987), empirical analyses have tended to focus almost entirely on how the process of deliberation impacts on marginal totals of attitude items at both the individual and aggregate level (Fishkin, 1997; Luskin, Fishkin and Jowell, 2002; Sturgis 2003). Little attention, in contrast, has been paid to outcomes that relate to other dimensions of opinion quality, such as attitude constraint. Constraint refers to the level of consistency between attitudes within an individual belief system which arises from a combination of logical, social and psychological factors (Converse 1964). In this paper we analyse data from five deliberative polls conducted in the UK in the 1990s to investigate the impact of political

We humans seem to have evolved with a need to know, a need to represent reality to ourselves insofar as our cognitive apparatus allows. This representational or knowing process appears to be a crucial aspect of our mode of coping with the environment. It is the tragedy of knowledge that this process, which we cannot do without, we cannot do well: it inevitably misrepresents the environment both by oversimplifying and by distorting it....Theonly thing more outrageous than using our faulty intellectual processes, including scientific inquiry, to arrive at a representation of reality is not to use them. (William J. McGuire, 1985b, pp. 584–585) The generation before mine was preoccupied with origins, whether evolution of the species or habit acquisition by the individual organism; the generation after my mid-century epistemological generation has been followed by one preoccupied with power, in actuality or in image. The elderly Yeats, in his poem Politics, poked gentle fun at Thomas Mann’s assertion that the destiny of man now presents its meaning in political terms, but Mann was prescient. Although a few topics dominate each generation, certain basic issues do receive some attention from every age