Psychological Studies of Policy Reasoning

The New York Times had an article on the difficulties that the public has to understand complex policy proposals – I’m Right (For Some Reason). The points in the article relate directly to the research I’ve been doing at Liverpool on the IMPACT Project, for we decompose a policy proposal into its constituent parts for examination and improved understanding. See our tool live: Structured Consultation Tool
Policy proposals are often presented in an encapsulated form (a sound bite). And those receiving it presume that they understand it, the illusion of explanatory depth discussed in a recent article by Frank Keil (a psychology professor at Cornell when and where I was a Linguistics PhD student). This is the illusion where people believe they understand a complex phenomena with greater precision, coherence, and depth than they actually do; they overestimate their understanding. To philosophers, this is hardly a new phenomena, but showing it experimentally is a new result.
In research about public policy, the NY Times authors, Sloman and Fernbach, describe experiments where people state a position and then had to justify it. The results showed that participants softened their views as a result, for their efforts to justify it highlighted the limits of their understanding. Rather than statements of policy proposals, they suggest:

Instead, we voters need to be more mindful that issues are complicated and challenge ourselves to break down the policy proposals on both sides into their component parts. We have to then imagine how these ideas would work in the real world — and then make a choice: to either moderate our positions on policies we don’t really understand, as research suggests we will, or try to improve our understanding.

Breaking down policy proposals into component parts for further investigation and understanding is exactly what we’ve been doing in the IMPACT Project.
This article and the references to further literature are not only intrinsically interesting, but they also give me additional ways of thinking about these issues and an evaluative paradigm for our tools.

Presentation at Conference on Agreement Technologies

I participated in the 1st International Conference on Agreement Technologies in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

The talk, Arguing from a Point of View, addresses the issue of extracting argumentative information from web-based information sources such as consumer product reviews or recommendations. Jodi Schneider is a co-author. The paper is available on the previous post. Some of the topics are developed further in our paper at SWAIE 2012.
Shortlink to this page.
By Adam Wyner

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Papers at JURIX 2012

I’m co-author of two papers at The 25th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2012), Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Links to the final drafts are forthcoming.
A Model-Based Critique Tool for Policy Deliberation
Adam Wyner, Maya Wardeh, Trevor Bench-Capon, and Katie Atkinson
Abstract
Domain models have proven useful as the basis for the construction and evaluation of arguments to support deliberation about policy proposals. Using a model provides the means to systematically examine and understand the fine-grained objections that individuals might have about the policy. While in previous approaches, a justification for a policy proposal is presented for critique by the user, here, we reuse the domain model to invert the roles of the citizen and the government: a policy proposal is elicited from the citizen, and a software agent automatically and systematically critiques it relative to the model and the government’s point of view. Such an approach engages citizens in a critical dialogue about the policy actions, which may lead to a better understanding of the implications of their proposals and that of the government. A web-based tool that interactively leads users through the critique is presented.
Bibtex
@INPROCEEDINGS{WynerEtAlCritique2012,
author = {Adam Wyner and Wardeh, Maya and Trevor Bench-Capon and Katie Atkinson},
title = {A Model-Based Critique Tool for Policy Deliberation},
booktitle = {Proceedings of 25th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2012)},
year = {2012},
pages = {167-176},
address = {Amsterdam},
publisher = {IOS Press}
comment = {Legal Knowledge and Information Systems. Jurix 2012: The AA-th Annual Conference}
}
An Empirical Approach to the Semantic Representation of Laws
Adam Wyner, Johan Bos, Valerio Basile, and Paulo Quaresma
Abstract
To make legal texts machine processable, the texts may be represented as linked documents, semantically tagged text, or translated to formal representations that can be automatically reasoned with. The paper considers the latter, which is key to testing consistency of laws, drawing inferences, and providing explanations relative to input. To translate laws to a form that can be reasoned with by a computer, sentences must be parsed and formally represented. The paper presents the state-of-the-art in automatic translation of law to a machine readable formal representation, provides corpora, outlines some key problems, and proposes tasks to address the problems.
Bibtex
@INPROCEEDINGS{WynerEtAlSemanticRep2012,
author = {Adam Wyner and Bos, Johan and Valerio Basile and Paulo Quaresma},
title = {An Empirical Approach to the Semantic Representation of Law},
booktitle = {Proceedings of 25th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2012)},
year = {2012},
pages = {177-180},
address = {Amsterdam},
publisher = {IOS Press}
}
Shortlink to this page.
By Adam Wyner

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.