Both prosociality in group context and morality are important aspects of social life and living together with others in society. In both situations, understanding the cognitive processes underlying... Show moreBoth prosociality in group context and morality are important aspects of social life and living together with others in society. In both situations, understanding the cognitive processes underlying the decisions is argued to be a crucial step in designing evidence-based interventions addressing not only choice outcomes, but the driving forces of the choices as well. Using fine-grained and unobtrusive measure of cognitive processes in the decision process, eye tracking is applied in the investigation of cognitive processes in this dissertation. Chapter 2 investigated active ignorance to others’ group membership. Chapter 3 presented two eye tracking studies, in which the cognitive processes of prosociality in intergroup contexts were investigated. Chapter 4 reported a study investigating the cognitive processes underlying moral decisions, speaking to the theoretical debate in moral decision making, advocating a choice discriminability perspective over the dual process theory of moral judgment. The work demonstrates the merit of further illuminating the inner workings of the “black box” of decision making, by using process-tracking techniques to gain insights about decision processes that would have been difficult to achieve when only using choices. Moreover, the work presented here makes a methodological contribution by developing a standardizable and incentivized moral dilemma task Show less
What influences decision-makers to attack another country when on the brink of war? The main aim of this study is to detect a causal mechanism underlying the decision to attack another country when... Show moreWhat influences decision-makers to attack another country when on the brink of war? The main aim of this study is to detect a causal mechanism underlying the decision to attack another country when on the brink of war, and whether or not this mechanism differs between regime-types. It investigates whether or not regime-type, the nature of the conflict, the power used, and hawkish beliefs of decision-makers matter in this decision. By addressing this question from a political psychological and comparative perspective, this dissertation tests the microfoundations of democratic peace theory simultaneously with alternative theories of decision-making during conflict resolution.The core analytical instrument is a decision-making experiment, executed in the US, Russia, and China. The experimental results are triangulated with a large N-study, and a case study. The overall results show that although the democratic peace as an empirical regularity might still be valid, the theoretical arguments to explain why democracies do not fight with each other turn out to be built on empirically unsupported foundations. This study argues that an actor-based approach towards decision-making processes within international relations offers important insights to the more structured-based theories of international relations. It thereby convincingly shows that the individual matters, also in IR. Show less
