Mark Joslyn

Individuals develop causal stories about the world around them that explain events, behaviors, and conditions. These stories may attribute causes to controllable components, such as individual choice, or uncontrollable components, such as systematic forces in the environment. Here we employ motivated reasoning and attribution theory to understand causal attributions the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, the 2009 Fort Hood shootings, and the 2011 Tucson, Arizona shootings. We argue that causal attributions stem from individual reasoning that is primarily motivated by existing dispositions and accuracy motives. Both motivations are present for attributions about these mass shootings and we seek to understand their significance and whether dispositional motives condition accuracy drives. We are able to test several hypotheses using individual level survey data from several national surveys to explain attributions about the shootings. Our findings suggest a substantial partisan divide on th...

In political disputes, issue frames set parameters for debate and shape which view dominates. This study expands issue framing research to examine the influence of frames on the perception of future terrorist threats as well as subsequent support for related counterterrorism policies. We test several hypotheses using data from an experimental field poll. We find that issue frames clearly influence perceptions of threat. However, our frames, which posit specific terrorism threats, only have a limited influence on respondent preferences for counter-terrorism policies. We consider a variety of explanations for these results and provide direction for future research.

... yielded a reasonably accurate demographic portrait of the state (see Appendix for profile details). ... reform is often framed as either an obligation between generations, one cohort supporting the ...Pro-Life Frame: Recently, the issue of physician-assisted suicide has received a lot of ...

Undoubtedly, framing political issues is an effective means of influencing the distribution of opinion. But while most studies have shown the effectiveness of alternative issue frames on opinion, they largely ignore the role of the messenger. Our research examines whether message content or messengers are more important in influencing opinion. Four experimental conditions and a control were embedded in a statewide survey, allowing an explicit comparison between the impact of frames comprising message content alone and the same frames attributed to public figures identified with physician-assisted suicide. Results show that an attributed source is no more effective than content alone in influencing opinion on physician-assisted suicide and that the messenger might in fact reduce the intended influence of the message. We conclude with a discussion of our findings within the larger literature on political persuasion and attitude change.

This article examines the extent to which a change in the information environment affected opinion of a recent gun safety ballot initiative in Washington. Through content analysis of newspaper stories and documentation of expenditures of competing interests, the authors are able to detect a discernable shift in the information environment during the final weeks of the campaign. Support for the initiative dropped appreciably concurrent with this shift. The authors are able to show that the altered information context (a) generated the greatest change among the most politically aware respondents and (b) sustained this effect within specific partisan classifications. Although previous research investigates analogous behavioral dynamics in a variety of political settings, this analysis differs in application to ballot initiative campaigns. The authors discuss the implications of their findings in terms of direct democracy campaigns and conclude that influence of competing interests are central to the nature and outcome of the election.