This award provides funds for the establishment of a Research Training Group in the Role of Cognition in Collective Political Decision Making. The faculty group is a mixture of Political Scientists and Psychologists at Ohio State University and at a number of other institutions throughout the country who will form an "Invisible College" for the purpose of this training effort. The centerpiece of the RTG will be an annual workshop to be held each summer for 6 weeks at Ohio State University. The workshop will explore the role of cognition and politics in the definition and development of solutions to societal problems. The funds will provide stipends for graduate students and postdoctoral trainees, will defray part of the cost of the trainees' research, and to defray the costs of participation in the summer workshops by investigators from other research and academic institutions. Institutional commitments will pay student tuition at Ohio State, allow the faculty to devote time to organization of the summer workshop, will defray a portion of the cost of the workshop and will insure continuation of some trainee positions after the termination of NSF support. Although many political decisions are made by groups, psychologists trying to understand the decision-making process have traditionally focussed on the definition of problems and solutions by individuals, while political scientists have focussed on the role of power and control rather than that of cognition. This training group will explore this relatively neglected interface between these two approaches. Examples of relevant research being pursued by the Ohio State faculty include investigation of the role of creativity in foreign policy decision making, of adjustments of outcome expectation in decision making, and of how individual agendas become group agendas in the decision making by community health boards. Additional research topics and expertise will come from the outside membership of the summer workshop faculty.
