9) DISCUSS POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS Although mentioned, it appears that an important perspective here is to analyze the means by which the public's opinion is measured. This analysis discusses extensively the interpretation of measurement efforts (i.e., public opinion surveys) and briefly discusses the relevance of word choice, question order, etc., but more information is necessary on whether a 'better' way of measuring would provide more stable opinion results. --ME Specifically, if it were possible to ask a question in which the measure could be more precisely defined to a specific and direct "opinion", then comparison among individuals for the same answer would provide more information on aggregate opinion stability. More directly, it seems to me that the approach to survey research questions is one that attempts to identify how an individual feels about a specific "action" (public policy specifically) as opposed to how a person feels about the "core element" of the political question. --ME previous research: focuses on correction instead we need to get the person in the right "frame" before; previous attempts to do this have not captured the right 'state' --ME Implications: One interesting consideration from this is measuring citizens' political knowledge. If personality affects knowledge (or at least how we measure it; Mondak indicates generally that an individual's personality has nearly as much to do with non-knowledge elements as their actual knowledge level. Although Mondak addresses specifically the inclusion of DKs (and the question wording seemed different than that used in the DV of this analysis) an interesting analysis would be an attempt to separate "environmental" effects, "actual knowledge" and "personality" affects. Additionally, this analysis seems to imply that an individual's "knowledge" is not in fact knowledge at all, but is instead a product of their "perception of knowledge" based on whatever environment they're exposed to. If variations in knowledge questions reflect not only 'real knowledge' but also personality-based indicators (whether a respondent is shy or a risk-taker) is it also possible that 'knowledge' is generated by the environment regardless of whether that knowledge is factual or not? And if so, how do you separate real "factual knowledge" from perceived knowledge that citizens seem to be assuming is factual? Or perhaps its not important to know whether a citizen's level of knowledge is based on something 'real' or 'experienced', but only what they know or think they know about a political issue. --ME Beliefs, perceptions, even opinions are all colored by our perception of the "external" world, while many of these are in essence really 'internal' beliefs about the external world, and not necessarily reality. For instance, Bates taught students how to improve their sight on the presumptive premise that one does not "see" the world out there, but instead sees the 'perception' of what's out there internally. In other words, straining to 'see' something far away wakes no sense because we do not actually interact directly with whatever we are seeing; rather, it is the image created in our mind, that appears either further or closer to us, that determines our "view" of the object. i.e., in relation to Aristotelian 'forms', we do not see the 'reality'.. but in fact, we "see" our internal perception/view of the 'reality'. We do not 'see' the person, but we instead see the image of that person as perceived through a process of interpretation between our eyes (which catch light variations cast from items in the world) and our perception or "decoding" of those images in our brain (how the brain translates the images into the conscious "mind" of seeing. --ME The idea is not to artificially put everyone "in the same place" but to instead find THEIR right response from a more objective "state", thus making responses comparable because instead of making people think of something from a perspective not comfortable to them, or instead of correcting "as if" everyone were at a "mid-range" perspective (King), we're allowing people to find their correct "thoughts" (through NLP, and this variation is of little consequence to us; at least in terms of HOW they get there) thus making responses comparable because EVERY PERSON IS VIEWING THE QUESTION FROM THEIR OWN HIGHEST GOOD, WHATEVER THAT MIGHT BE --ME the reason we have difficult answering an opinion question objectively is because we cannot disassociate our position from our emotions regarding this position. being able to "chunk up" to that highest good (whatever it might be) can allow us to account for variation from individual "from where I'm standing" perspectives (which ultimately isn't as important as the 'true reflection of how a person feels) and obtain their real perspective. This is true because people have conflicting parts of them that have various beliefs about issues that are complex and difficult. If we can, through survey questions, help the person wade through these conflicting difficulties, get them to a point in which they "are" at some comfortable level of consensus within themselves on the issue, and THEN answer the question, we can better guage where their true feelings or opinions may lay. --ME "the extent to which this c-system detection would be relevant depends on the motivation and availability of cognitive resources to devote attention to these subtle conflicts. --LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003 "Load vastly diminishes the contributions of prefrontal cortex to conscious deliberation by diverting working memory resources elsewhere" ----THIS is the idea --- to divert the mind to more noncounscious responses thus limiting the amount of biasing "media effects, political sophistication" or other extraneous variables that often reduce the viability of such measures --LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003 I need to make links between this x-system concept and c-system and where/how NLP works to get more squarely at issues (though this will have to be an assumed link---- the link between accessing considerations in a parts perspective as being more 'reliable' than those developed through the former systems --ME "when the conflict between activated considerations is low, the x-system is likely to be the primary contributor to self-reported attitudes, and as such may produce increasingly affect-based attitudes with sophistication" # "alternatively, when the conflict between considerations is high, the c-system should be recruited and able to produce attitudes that follow an increasing degree of objective rule-based logic with increasingly levels of political sophistication" --LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003 The question for neuroscience is how political sophisticates process survey items differently than political novices ---- for our purposes, however, the question is whether we can tap measures of political attitude that bypasses the x-system and allows for more reliable collective assessments of political opinion --LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003 "Political sophistication is likely to play a role in the degree to which the x-system can tolerate conflict." ----attitude opinions are generated dependent upon the ability of the x-system to order conflictual information - this process is enhanced through increased political sophistication --LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003 The reason we've had difficulty finding ways of measuring media effects is that change knowledge representations is a cortical system which slowly builds up over time because the representations stored by that system can change only very slowly and with repeated exposures to relevant stimuli ---- changes require many more counter-stereotypic experiences ---- since we know that individuals prefer to be exposed to attitudes and preferences that are most like their own, it would be seen more difficult to measure these "changes" based on media exposure through simply processes of survey efforts that are short-run and cannot possibly measure the amount or extent of 'built up' representational systems (to compare any 'before exposure and after exposure' effects). Additionally, because the process is so slow, it is a social process that involves a long time to develop for the individual# changing one situation in a survey or experimental setting does not effectively "change" a persons opinions at all (as has been shown by previous research) and this is why -----now all I'm missing is a review of the NLP/parts perspective that will give foundational support for the use and viability of "generating a parts perspective" in an attempt to bypass the x-system in a way that does not allow for c-system bias (in sophistication and knowledge) to screw responses --LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003 "Zaller's model explains how the C-system should operate under conditions of low motivation, incorporating only easily accessible considerations into self-reported political attitudes." This low motivation condition aptly describes the average participant when they are interrupted from other concerns to answer survey times." --LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003 "Either low motivation or scant cognitive resources can make the c-system more likely to provide heuristic outputs, whereas high motivation and copious cognitive resources can lead to more systematic c-system outputs. --LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003 When political sophisticates (or those more knowledgeable AND with greater efficiency for processing complex information) attempt survey questions, they do so with the advantage of this capacity; non sophisticates, on the other hand, do not have this process# however, we should be able to create a situation in which both political sophisticates and non-sophisticates are able to process the information at the same "level" .. thereby making correlations and collective analysis more reliable ----- a way to measure if this might be the case would be to take survey research project already done, and see if the questions can be divided by those which "require x-system" analysis and those that require "c-system analysis".. then do cross-correlations using political knowledge, education, etc., as moderating variables. If there are correlations between political sophisticates and non-sophisticates that differ between the "c-system" questions and the "x-system" questions, then we could hypothesize that political sophistication is important not because they are more knowledgeable, per se, but because they appropriate the right conscious level of thinking, at the right time, with the right information; comparing collective responses with sophisticates and non-sophisticates, then, gives us unreliable measures or real political attitudes and opinions. --LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003 Even more important, however, is that c-systems are driven by motivational factors; the extent to which the individual can devote conscious resources to the task at hand. Motivation, in return, may also be affected by the level of complexity with which individuals view particular questions, based on how difficult the 'conflicting' issues are to process, and the level of general knowledge they have on the subject. --LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003 If we prefer c-system outputs for truer measures of opinion and preferences, the idea would be to create a scenario in which individuals can all process the survey question at this level, without regard to outside influences. --ME "Political sophistication is likely to play a role in the degree to which the x-system can tolerate conflict." --LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003 "political sophistication may not primarily produce main effect differences in attitudes" --LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003 Reaction to political issues is a combination of a respondents use of episodic memory (medial temporal lobe for the storage of experiences as tied to particular places, times, and people) and semantic memory (largely dependent on lateral and inferior temporal cortex and consists of facts about the world without respect to the context in which they were learned (typical knowledge measures). --LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003 "Heuristic thought allows conflicting considerations to go unnoticed unless the conflicting considerations are each highly accessible at the same moment. Depending on current goals, recent mental activity, and the structure of the survey items, different considerations are likely to be active at different times leading to different attitude responses without any changes in the enduring dispositions and mental representations in the mind of the respondent". In both cases, recent goals, thoughts, and contexts will bias the attitude construction process. ---attitudes, opinions, and preferences, however, are a unique combination of both of these processes, and as such, one cannot measure responses without taking into consideration the fact that different individuals will access different memories, and in different ways, each time they respond to a different questions --LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003 9) "The number of conflicting considerations accessible for the individual and the degree to which the neural networks can temporarily smooth over these conflicts, will play a major part in determining which mental mechanism(s) contribute to the reported attitude." ---All this implies that it is the state that an individual is in at the time of the survey, the knowledge they have about an issue, the thought processes used and its sophistication for each individual, as well as a host of other processes going on at the time, that will determine how an individual answers an attitudinal survey question. The implication then is finding a way in which all respondents can have, even for a moment, the same level of social cognition, be in the same "system" of processing at the time of the question, and as much as possible, be provided the same level of information, to reduce bias as a result of variations in political sophistication which will make answering some conflicting questions easier for some respondents then for others (hence this indicates why and how political scientists reveal differences in political "knowledge".. which is really no more than information that a respondent is able to process more efficiently at a given time PLUS the actual semantic knowledge they possess). --LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003 "it is likely that episodic and semantic memories constitute many of the considerations implicated by Zaller (1990) in attitude formation. --LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003 Implications: This is a great effort to provide solutions to variability based on question interpretations. Instead, however, of "stubracting off" estimated DIF from the responses, ideally there would be a way to put people on the same "response plane" to begin with. Still believe its possible to construct survey questions that can accomplish this, but many of the difficulties in constructing such survey questions are addressed in this article, and should be addressed in anything that attempts to do more. Also an issue is making sure that these questions designed can apply across cultures without similar DIF biases. Also important, ensuring that constructed survey questions are feasible for typical subjective concepts such as freedom, efficacy, etc., and ensuring that the assumption of measurablility is logically coherent and addresses multiple culture criteria. Essentially the effort would be to do what the authors suggest is quite difficult: to construct "DIF-free" questions. --ME The x- and c-systems are then used to retrieve various sorts of experiences and emotions and to make use of this information when making judgments. The x-system spontaneously and often nonconsciously integrates current goals, context, perceptions, and activated cognition into a coherent whole that guides the stream of consciousness and current behavior --LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003 The c-system serves as an alarm system that monitors the coherence of the x-system processes. Once activated, this system sends a signal to the other that a conflict has been detected requiring conscious attention and effort in the form of working memory and propositional processes --LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003 "there are several distinct mechanisms of attitude formation and judgment. These mechanisms have different properties from one another in terms of the informational inputs to which they are sensitive, the computations performed on active representations, as well as the regions of the brain to which process outputs are delivered." --LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003