Klicken Sie auf die Dreiecke in der untersten Zeile des Fensters, um durch die Präsentation zum Vortrag zu navigieren.

Das Buch basiert auf dem 2008-2010 am > Institut Futur der Freien Universität Berlin durchgeführten Forschungsprojekt “Integrierte Transferstrategie für Nachhaltige Entwicklung” (> ITS). Die Autoren hatten Experten, Bürgerinnen und Bürger sowie kommunalpolitische Entscheidungsträger zu gewünschten und erwarteten Veränderungen der Siedlungsentwicklung in Deutschland bis zum Jahr 2020 befragt und, basierend auf diesen Befragungen, verschiedene Zukunftsszenarien entwickelt.

Weitere Informationen zum Projekt finden sich hier: > Internetauftritt ITS

Das Buch “Transfer sozialer Innovationen” kann beim VS Verlag bezogen werden: > Link zum Buch

Wie kann man das erklären? Verfall bürgerlicher Werte? Macht geht über alles? “Die da oben haben sowieso alle Dreck am Stecken?” Aus psychologischer Sicht gibt es eine viel einfachere und weniger folgenschwere Erklärung, nämlich das Prinzip motivierter Schlussfolgerungen (Kunda, 1990). Wenn wir mit einer Flut teils widersprüchlicher Fakten und Gefühle konfrontiert sind (im politischen Leben also eigentlich immer), bevorzugen wir Erklärungen, die mit unseren Werten und Wünschen möglichst kompatibel sind. Dass die verschiedenen politischen Bewertungen der Causa Guttenberg ein Produkt motivierten Schließens darstellen, versuchen > Paul Thagard und ich mit der folgenden Simulationsstudie zu zeigen.

Why has Guttenberg stayed so popular? Emotion-biased inference in judging a political leader

Tobias Schröder and Paul Thagard, University of Waterloo

In February 2011, German federal minister of defense Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, at the time one of the country’s most popular politicians, was accused of having plagiarized substantial parts of his PhD thesis (Fischer-Lescano, 2011). He first denied the allegations, calling them “absurd,” but the evidence soon became overwhelming, resulting in the University of Bayreuth revoking his degree. Much to the amazement of many journalists commenting on the case, the scandal seemed to leave Guttenberg’s popularity largely unaffected. He refused to resign from his office, and federal chancellor Angela Merkel, herself holding a PhD, rebuffed opposition party leaders calling for her to dismiss the minister of defense from her government. Her statement that she had not hired Guttenberg as a research assistant, but rather as minister of defense (FAZ, 2011), outraged not only the opposition parties, but also thousands of academics who felt that the government was trivializing the violation of intellectual property rights.

The course of events has puzzled many. To be sure, Guttenberg later resigned (shortly before we finished this article), perhaps due to ongoing public pressures from the German scientific community. But, according to opinion surveys (e.g., Emnid, 2011; Infratest Dimap, 2011; Luck, 2011), public sentiment never turned away from him. In Germany, a doctoral degree comes with a high amount of social prestige even outside academia. Thus, most higher-educated people, and certainly most conservatives, would consider a plagiarized PhD thesis a very serious offense. It is certainly true that politicians have had to resign for much less serious misconduct in recent German history. So why were the governing conservative parties and many ordinary people so reluctant to withdraw their support from Guttenberg, given the gravity of the accusations and the hardly deniable evidence? In the present paper, we will argue that a psychological principle of emotion-biased or motivated inference can account for what has happened (e.g., Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003; Kunda, 1990; Kunda & Sinclair, 1999; Thagard, 2006).

Emotion-biased Political Judgment
Emotions play a powerful role in political judgment. During the 2004 presidential election campaign in the U.S.A., Westen, Blagov, Harenski, Kilts, & Hamann (2006) presented Democratic and Republican partisans with logically inconsistent statements of John Kerry, George W. Bush, or a politically neutral person, while scanning the partisans’ brains with fMRI. The idea was “to create a head-to-head conflict between the constraints on belief imposed by reason and evidence (data showing that the candidate had done something inconsistent or […] bad) and the constraints imposed by emotion (strong feelings toward the parties and the candidates)” (Westen, 2007, p. xi). None of the subjects had a problem with detecting inconsistencies in the opposing candidate’s statements, and Republicans and Democrats did equally well in judging the neutral person. But when it came to their own candidate, partisans indicated they had not perceived the statements as inconsistent, while fMRI data showed increased blood flow in brain areas associated with emotion regulation. These neural circuits “seemed to recruit beliefs that eliminated the distress and conflict partisans had experienced when they confronted unpleasant realities” (Westen, 2007, p. xiv).

It should be emphasized that emotion-biased inference is different from wishful thinking. After all, humans do consider facts when they try to figure out the truth. But, in sufficiently ambiguous situations (and in politics, a lot is ambiguous), they prefer truths that are consistent with their values. Facts and emotions operate as simultaneous constraints on judgments. By trying to satisfy them in parallel, people arrive at emotionally coherent conclusions (Thagard, 2006), which correspond to their subjective truths about the ongoing events.

The present research
We analyzed the cognitive and emotional structure of the political debate surrounding the Guttenberg plagiarism scandal. We created cognitive-affective maps (Thagard, 2010) indicating how different stakeholders may have mentally represented the ongoing debate, and we used Thagard’s (2006) connectionist HOTCO software (for “HOt COherence”) to demonstrate how these representations may have amalgamated into contrasting political judgments of the German minister of defense. We will conclude this article with a discussion of cognitive-affective mechanisms underlying political debates.

Method
Cognitive-affective Maps of Plagiarism Case
A cognitive-affective map (CAM; Thagard, 2010) is a tool to analyze the set of constraints that defines the mental representation of a specific issue, where constraints stem from both evidence and values. Suppose you just read in the newspaper that an academic accused Guttenberg of plagiarism, while the minister repudiated the allegation. You might represent the two pieces of evidence (an academic’s testimony and Guttenberg’s denial) along with corresponding hypotheses about the minister’s guilt like in Fig. 1a, where the dashed lines represent incoherence between elements. You cannot believe the minister to be both guilty and not guilty at the same time, so you will represent one of these explanations as wrong. Now which? If you had a high opinion of Guttenberg before the first suspicion of plagiarism became public (i.e., the politician elicited a positive emotional reaction in you), chances are you were unlikely to believe the accusation in the first place. This is depicted in Fig. 1b. Note that Guttenberg is represented with a circle. In CAMs, circles mean positive valences. The solid line indicates that your hypothetically positive feelings for Guttenberg are coherent with your representing his denial as corresponding to the truth. If you like him, you believe him. Still, you would feel the need to find an explanation for the academic’s testimony, a piece of evidence contradicting your values. So, if you happen to be Hans-Peter Friedrich, at the time spokesman of the Christian-social Union (CSU) in parliament and Guttenberg’s political ally, you might have been pleased to find out that Andreas Fischer-Lescano, who raised the first plagiarism accusations, is involved with a left-wing think tank. This fact caused Friedrich to come up with “political attack from the left” as a hypothetical explanation for the allegations against the defense minister (Mittelbayerische Zeitung, 2011). Fig. 1c is a possible CAM of Friedrich’s early representation of the case. It contains all the possible features of CAMs: Solid lines are for positive constraints (i.e., two elements of the representation are consistent with each other) and dashed lines represent negative constraints (i.e., two elements are mutually exclusive). The shape of the elements corresponds to their emotional value: rectangles are neutral, whereas circles and hexagons represent positive and negative affect, respectively.

Fig. 1 Cognitive-affective maps of early reactions to plagiarism case

We constructed a CAM of the Guttenberg case at the time it was debated in the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament (Bundestag, 2011). At that point, Guttenberg had admitted “errors” in his PhD thesis, but denied any deliberate intention to cheat and, consequently, refused to resign from office. His popularity was high, both with conservative party leaders and the public. This is accounted for by Guttenberg being represented as a circle in the bottom row of Fig. 2. The remainder of the map shows the available evidence, the competing explanations for the evidence, as well as the different political consequences that were debated in parliament. Guttenberg’s critics argued that most of the known facts (Guttenberg’s announcement to forego calling himself a doctor in the future, academics’ testimony, and the Guttenplag Wiki, a collaborative project on the web aimed at finding plagiarized sections in Guttenberg’s thesis1) clearly corroborated the hypothesis that the minister deliberatively cheated in order to obtain his doctorate - indicated by solid lines in Fig. 2. Many explained this behavior in terms of Guttenberg’s questionable character as a conceited nobleman who wanted to impress the public with a degree he was not capable of obtaining in a legitimate way. This negative character trait also explained why he still denied the accusations (the fourth piece of evidence in Fig. 2). Consequently, in the eyes of the opposition, he was no longer morally suitable as a political leader and should resign.

Fig. 1 Cognitive-affective map of Bundestag debate of plagiarism case

An alternative, much more favorable, explanation of the same facts was provided by Guttenberg himself, and readily defended by conservatives during the debate in parliament. According to this perspective, Guttenberg’s failure to successfully manage all the demands resulting from his successful political work, his being a young family father, and working in science at the same time caused him to not fully understand all the complicated details of academic standards (this is the “sloppy science” hypothesis in Fig. 2). Consequently, he was morally suitable as a leader (how could such a hardworking and caring family father not be? – see the solid line in Fig. 2). If you add in his good work in the government, as stressed by Angela Merkel who said she had not hired a research assistant (FAZ, 2011), you have very compelling reasons why he should stay in office.

Computer Simulation of Emotional Coherence
The cognitive-affective map in Fig. 2 incorporates many ambiguities. No single person can believe everything at the same time, and each of the speakers in parliament expressed a very clear and coherent position, favoring either of the competing hypotheses and connected set of consequences. How would an observer of the debate make sense of the ambiguities and come to a coherent judgment about desirable political consequences? In order to answer this question, we constructed an artificial neural network implementing the cognitive and emotional constraints from Fig. 2. We used Thagard’s (2006) HOTCO program to conduct a simulation, where we kept the factual evidence and the cognitive structure of the argument constant but varied the valence input. Simulation 1 implements the map from Fig. 2 as is, with a positive emotional association for the defense minister. This models the perception of conservative members of the Bundestag as well as the majority of the public who held favorable sentiments toward Guttenberg. Simulation 2 is exactly the same except that we set a negative valence input for the minister, supposedly modeling the opposition members’ representation of the case (in Fig. 2, we would simply exchange the Guttenberg circle for a Guttenberg hexagon). Simulation 3 was supposed to model the judgments made by conservative academics such as journalists from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a conservative newspaper which published some of the harshest comments on the Guttenberg case: What would happen if one initially liked the minister of defense, but also liked scientific principles such as giving proper credit to other’s thoughts (i.e., one person held conflicting values about the Guttenberg case)? In order to answer this question, we implemented a subtle variant of the cognitive-affective map from Fig. 2, where we added an additional positive valence node “appreciation of scientific principles” with positive connections (solid lines) to the node representing academics’ testimony and to the “intentionally cheated” hypothesis supported by that evidence.

HOTCO models positive and negative constraints between elements as excitatory and inhibitory connections, respectively, between nodes representing the elements. Activations of all the nodes are updated in parallel in various cycles until the network has settled with some elements represented as true (i.e., activated) and others as false (i.e., inhibited). For details on the general algorithm, see Thagard (2006, p. 49-50). The specific LISP code used as input for the present simulations is available upon request from the first author (tschroed [at] uwaterloo.ca).

Results
Table 1 displays the outcome of the HOTCO simulations. The + and – signs in the table mean that the corresponding elements are accepted (i.e., represented as true) or rejected (i.e., represented as false) after the network has settled. In all simulations, no piece of evidence ever gets rejected. The prediction is that all people believe all the facts, regardless of political values. However, the interpretation of those facts varies with emotional biases: As simulation 1 indicates, people with strong positive feelings toward Guttenberg are likely to believe his story of a hardworking family father who eventually lost track of the detailed rules of correct citations. They continue to consider him as a morally suitable leader and they wish him to stay in office. In contrast, simulation 2 predicts that observers with initial bad feelings about the minister of defense will be convinced that he deliberately cheated when trying to obtain a doctoral degree and, as a consequence, he is no longer a legitimate leader and should resign. The results of simulation 3 are particularly interesting. They predict not only that conservative academics will accept the cheating hypothesis and reject the minister’s “sloppy science” explanation, but they will also abandon their previously positive feelings of him and come to a new, unfavorable assessment of his political work. In light of the available evidence, academic values win over political preferences.

Discussion
We demonstrated how emotion-biased inference explains the controversial judgments that different observers made about the recent plagiarism scandal involving the popular former German minister of defense. The results of our simulation are very much in line with the study by Westen et al. (2006), who showed that emotions towards political leaders can distort judgments even to a point where they contradict the laws of logic. But our study also goes beyond Westen’s et al. argument in that we demonstrated the impact of conflicting values (like the appreciation of academic principles vs. endorsing a popular politician) on political judgment. In our simulation 3, a specific configuration of facts and values not only resulted in a certain transient interpretation of a specific event, but also caused a change in some of the initial political values. This has important implications for the relationship between emotions and reasoning in politics. Not only can emotions create biases in the interpretation of facts, as demonstrated by Westen et al. (2006), our simulations 1 and 2, and, ultimately, the course of events surrounding the Guttenberg case, but motivated reasoning and learning about new facts can also generate new feelings about political leaders and issues. Then, successful political communication is not only about the best arguments, but also (or, even, primarily) about creating an emotional preparedness in the minds of the audience, guiding their attention to selected facts. The good news for the scientific community in Germany is that their values have seemed to be emotionally appealing enough to make their rational arguments heard by the public. Consequently, a person who committed the most serious academic offense is no longer part of the German government.

References
Bundestag (2011). Stenografischer Bericht. 92. Sitzung des 17. Deutschen Bundestages (Plenarprotokoll 17/92). Berlin: Deutscher Bundestag.

Emnid (2011, March 2). N24-Emnid-Umfrage zum Guttenberg-Rücktritt: Mehrheit glaubt an Guttenberg-Comeback. Menschlich nicht enttäuscht. Mitschuld der Medien. Retrieved March 4, 2011 from [Link]

FAZ (2011, February 21). Merkel: Als Minister ist Guttenberg hervorragend. [Merkel: As minister, Guttenberg is outstanding] Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Retrieved March 4, 2011 from [Link]

Fischer-Lescano, A. (2011). Karl-Theodor Frhr. zu Guttenberg, Verfassung und Verfassungsvertrag. Konstitutionelle Entwicklungsstufen in den USA und der EU. Kritische Justiz. Vierteljahresschrift für Recht und Politik, 44, 112-119.

Infratest Dimap (2011, February 22). Guttenberg beliebter als vor Plagiatsaffäre. Retrieved February 28, 2011 from [Link]

Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 339-375.

Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108, 480-498.

Kunda, Z. & Sinclair, L. (1999). Motivated reasoning with stereotypes: Activation, application, and inhibition. Psychological Inquiry, 10, 12-22.

Luck, H. (2011, February 27). Jeder Zweite hält Guttenberg für kanzlertauglich. Focus online. Retrieved February 28, 2011 from [Link]

Mittelbayerische Zeitung (2011, February 16). Attacken auf die Guttenberg-Kritiker. Retrieved March 4, 2011 from [Link]

Thagard, P. (2006). Hot thought: Mechanisms and applications of emotional cognition. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Thagard, P. (2010). EMPATHICA: A computer support system with visual representations for cognitive-affective mapping. In K. McGregor (Ed.), Proceedings of the workshop on visual reasoning and representation (pp. 79-81). Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press.

Westen, D. (2007). The political brain. The role of emotion in deciding the fate of the nation. New York: PublicAffairs.

Westen, D., Blagov, P. S., Harenski, K., Kilts, C., & Hamann, S. (2006). Neural Bases of motivated reasoning: An fMRI study of emotional constraints on partisan political judgment in the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 1947-1958.

Zunächst soll untersucht werden, wie sich Angehörige verschiedener gesellschaftlicher Milieus in der emotionalen Wahrnehmung von Sprache unterscheiden. In einem zweiten Schritt geht es darum, welche Konsequenzen solche unterschiedlichen sprachlich-emotionalen Repräsentationen für das Erleben sozialer Interaktion haben. Diese Frage wird mit Hilfe der Simulationssoftware INTERACT untersucht, die auf der Affect Control Theory von Heise basiert (zu den Hintergründen siehe der Bereich >Computersimulation von sozialer Interaktion auf dieser Homepage). In einer dritten Studie wird versucht, milieu- bzw. schichtspezifische physiologische und neuronale Korrelate der affektiven Verarbeitung sprachlicher Reize nachzuweisen. Letztlich läuft das interdisziplinäre Projekt auf eine emotions- und neurowissenschaftliche Konkretisierung des Begriffs der Inkorporierung aus der einflussreichen Habitustheorie von Pierre Bourdieu hinaus.

Das Projekt wird im Rahmen des Exzellenzclusters aus Mitteln der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) gefördert. Es beginnt im Oktober 2010 und hat eine Laufzeit von zwei Jahren. Demnächst sind zwei Stellen für wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter(innen) und zwei Stellen für studentische Hilfskräfte zu besetzen:

>Link zum Stellenanzeiger der FU Berlin

>Link zur offiziellen Homepage des Projekts

Im neuen Projekt INNO-SIM wird das >Institut Futur an der >Freien Universität Berlin unter anderem diese Fragen untersuchen. Ganz allgemein hängt der Erfolg einer technologisch orientierten Nachhaltigkeitsstrategie nicht nur von den Innovationen ab, die in der Industrie und anderswo entwickelt werden (Angebotsseite), sondern auch maßgeblich von der Akzeptanz dieser Innovationen durch weite Teile der Bevölkerung (Nachfrageseite). Es kommt daher für den Erfolg der Nachhaltigkeitsstrategie in hohem Maße auf individuelle Entscheidungen an. Diese Entscheidungen werden wir in einem „agentenbasierten Modell“ simulieren. Ein solches Modell bildet die komplexen Kommunikationsprozesse einer Vielzahl von individuellen Akteuren ab. Ein besonderes Augenmerk im Projekt INNO-SIM wird dabei auf emotionalen Prozessen liegen, weil wir – im Einklang mit dem aktuellen Wissensstand in Psychologie und Hirnforschung – davon ausgehen, dass Emotionen eine maßgebliche Rolle bei der Wahrnehmung und Bewertung von Innovationen und bei der Entscheidungsfindung spielen.

Das Projekt INNO-SIM unter der Leitung von Gerhard de Haan und Tobias Schröder wird vom Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) über eine Laufzeit von zwei Jahren mit knapp 300.000 Euro gefördert. Start ist voraussichtlich im September 2010. Im Rahmen des Projekts sind voraussichtlich demnächst die folgenden Stellen zu besetzen:

Wiss. Mitarbeiter(in) 100% befristet bis 31.8.2012
>Download Stellenausschreibung

2 Stud. Hilfskräfte (je 40 Std.) befristet bis 31.8.2012
>Download Stellenausschreibung

Hinweis: Die Bewerbungsfrist wurde auf den 17.9.2010 verlängert!

Weitere Informationen zum Thema Innovationstransfer und zur sozialwissenschaftlichen Zukunftsforschung sind auf der Webseite des Institut Futur verfügbar: >www.institutfutur.de

Das 30-Hektar-Ziel
Die Bundesregierung und viele Experten vertreten daher das Ziel, den Flächen”verbrauch” bis zum Jahr 2020 auf “nur noch” 30 Hektar pro Tag zu reduzieren. Zahlreiche städtebauliche Innovationen wurden entwickelt, die alle mehr oder weniger um die Idee der nachverdichteten, kompakteren Stadt kreisen, in der neue Wohnbebauung nicht mehr auf neu erschlossenen Flächen am Rande erfolgt, sondern auf brachliegenden Flächen im Zentrum bzw. in Form der Umnutzung bestehender Gebäude. Im städtischen Bereich könnte das eine zum Loft umfunktionierte Fabriketage sein, im ländlichen Bereich ist vielleicht eher an ein renoviertes Bauernhaus zu denken.

Das große Problem mit der 30-Hektar-Strategie ist bloß: Sie funktioniert nicht. Seit Jahren sind Probleme und Problemlösungsmöglichkeiten allen Städtebau-Experten wohl bekannt, aber es ändert sich wenig bis nichts. Ein Rückgang der Siedlungstätigkeit und der Bodenversiegelung lässt sich bisher nicht feststellen, von konjunktur- und zuletzt krisenbedingten Schwankungen einmal abgesehen. Das hat vielerlei Gründe, angefangen von fehlendem Wissen und Problembewusstsein bei den Akteuren vor Ort, über rechtliche und steuerliche Rahmenbedingungen für die Kommunen bis hin zu den persönlichen Lebensvorstellungen der Bürgerinnen und Bürger, bei denen das flächenzehrende Einfamilienhaus immer noch Sinnbild für viele identitätsrelevante Werte ist.

Repräsentative Bevölkerungsbefragung
Um vor allem über den letzteren Punkt mehr zu erfahren und Ansatzpunkte für eine erfolgreiche Veränderung von Siedlungsmustern zu bekommen, welche die Wünsche und Bedürfnisse der Bevölkerung berücksichtigt, haben wir Anfang 2010 im Rahmen des Forschungsprojektes > Integrierte Transferstrategie für nachhaltige Entwicklung an der Freien Universität Berlin eine repräsentative Befragung durchgeführt – unseres Wissens erstmalig. Erste Ergebnisse wurden kürzlich auf einer Fachtagung der Evangelischen Akademie Villigst zur Zukunft ländlicher Räume präsentiert und können nachfolgend heruntergeladen werden. Ausführliche, laufend aktualisierte Informationen zum Forschungsprojekt sind außerdem unter
> www.its-transfer.de verfügbar.

> Download Vortragsfolien Bevölkerungsstudie Flächenverbrauch

Sie können hier die deutsche Version von INTERACT ausprobieren. Dafür müssen Sie allerdings die > Nutzungsbedingungen akzeptieren. Eine Bedienungsanleitung finden Sie > hier. Klicken Sie auf das nebenstehende Bild, um das Programm zu starten.

Das mathematische Modell, welches INTERACT zugrunde liegt, basiert auf der Affektsteuerungstheorie (”Affect Control Theory”), die annimmt, dass Menschen bei der Steuerung ihrer sozialen Handlungen sich an kulturell geteilten, über die Sprache vermittelten emotionalen Situationsdeutungen orientieren. Genauere Erläuterungen zum wissenschaftlichen Hintergrund finden Sie > hier.

Das ist nur eines von vielen interessanten Ergebnissen des Expertendelphis “Personalentwicklung 2020″, die jetzt vorliegen. Die Studie ist in der zweiten Jahreshälfte 2009 am Institut Futur der Freien Universität entstanden, in Kooperation mit den wirtschaftspsychologischen Unternehmensberatungen PfO Partnerschaft und GreenCard Consult. Ausführliche Informationen über das Delphi finden Sie hier auf meinen Internetseiten.