David R Mandel
Biographic Data
| ID | 602192 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David R Mandel |
| GIVEN NAMES | David R |
| FAMILY NAME | Mandel |
| SIGNATURE | MANDEL D R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Defence Research and Development Canada |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1036-2286 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 62 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 108 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Everyone I Don’t Like Is Biased
People commonly exhibit a bias blind spot (BBS), judging themselves as less susceptible to bias than the “average other.” However, less is known about how people attribute bias to familiar others who evoke strong affect. We examined whether attributions of bias are sensitive to affective impressions of others. In Experiment 1, participants viewed themselves as considerably less biased than the average survey respondent and a personally-known disl…
Promoting and evaluating Intelligence assessment quality
Intelligence studies scholars have discussed multiple criteria for promoting and evaluating intelligence assessment quality, including the degree to which intelligence organizations can tamp down on strategic surprises, ratchet up estimative accuracy, please decision-makers, and follow tradecraft guidelines. These criteria are examined through the lens of accountability pressures and strategies for dealing with such pressures. The criteria discus…
Verbal and numeric probabilities differentially shape decisions
Experts often communicate probabilities verbally (e.g., unlikely) rather than numerically (e.g., 25% chance). Although criticism has focused on the vagueness of verbal probabilities, less attention has been given to the potential unintended, biasing effects of verbal probabilities in communicating probabilities to decision-makers. In four experiments (Ns = 201, 439, 435, 696), we showed that probability format (i.e., verbal vs. numeric) influence…
Critical review of the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses technique
Intelligence communities regularly produce important assessments that inform policymakers. The Analysis of Competing Hypotheses technique (ACH) is one of the most widely-touted methods for improving the accuracy of those assessments. But does ACH work? This critical review identified seven articles describing six experiments testing ACH. The results indicate ACH – as a whole – has little to no overall benefit on judgment quality, and may even har…
Beyond Bias Minimization
For the last half-century, the U.S. and Allied Intelligence Community (IC) has sought to minimize the ostensibly detrimental effects of cognitive biases on intelligence practice. The dominant approach has been to develop structured analytic techniques (SATs), teach them to analysts in brief training sessions, provide the means to use SATs on the job, and hope they work. The SAT approach, however, suffers from severe conceptual problems and a pauc…
The Intelligentsia in the Civil War
Vikentiy Veresaev’s novel V tupike (In a Dead-End) was the first major Soviet literary work set in the civil war of 1918-21. It continued Veresaev’s already established literary focus on the evolution of the political and spiritual outlooks among Russia’s socialist intelligentsia, those educated members of society whose life was guided by a commitment to improving the life of the toiling classes. This article focuses on the novel’s depiction of a…
When Half Is at Least 50
Expert judgment often involves estimating magnitudes, such as the frequency of deaths due to a pandemic. Three experiments ( N s = 902, 431, and 755, respectively) were conducted to examine the effect of outcome framing (e.g., half of a threatened group expected to survive vs. die), probability level (low vs. high), and probability format (verbal, numeric, or combined) on the estimated frequency of survivals/deaths. Each experiment found an inter…
Insights into the accuracy of social scientists' forecasts of societal change
Policy for promoting analytic rigor in intelligence
Following significant intelligence failures, the United States intelligence community adopted Intelligence Community Directive 203 (ICD203) to promote analytic rigor. We developed two psychometric scales to examine how strongly intelligence professionals (N = 108) endorsed the analytic standards comprising ICD203 and how strongly they believed their organizations complied with these standards. All ICD203 facets were highly endorsed and clustered …
American and Chinese Public Opinion in an Era of Great Power Competition
As the US-China great power competition intensifies, public opinion polling may help gauge internal drivers of foreign policy decision-making. Using Pew Research Center data, the authors analyzed how American and Chinese respondents viewed their own and each other's countries between 2008–2016. They further examined how American attitudes towards China varied by political affiliation between 2008–2019. Both Americans and the Chinese displayed ing…
Meta‐informational cue inconsistency and judgment of information accuracy
Meta‐information is information about information that can be used as cues to guide judgments and decisions. Three types of meta‐information that are routinely used in intelligence analysis are source reliability, information credibility, and classification level. The first two cues are intended to speak to information quality (in particular, the probability that the information is accurate), and classification level is intended to describe the i…
Uncertainty, Intelligence, and National Security Decisionmaking
Intelligence analysis and national security decision-making are pervaded by uncertainty.The most consequential decisions that leaders make, such as whether to go to war, are mired in uncertainties not only reflecting what is unknown but also what is unknowable, such as the intentions of others who may not have made up their own minds. 1 Those uncertainties not only make decisions about how to resolve international conflicts more difficult, they c…
Arithmetic computation with probability words and numbers
Probability information is regularly communicated to experts who must fuse multiple estimates to support decision making. Such information is often communicated verbally (e.g., “likely”) rather than with precise numeric (point) values (e.g., “.75”), yet people are not taught to perform arithmetic on verbal probabilities. We hypothesized that the accuracy and logical coherence of averaging and multiplying probabilities will be poorer when individu…
Risky-choice framing and rational decision-making
This article surveys the latest research on risky-choice framing effects, focusing on the implications for rational decision-making. An influential program of psychological research suggests that people's judgements and decisions depend on the way in which information is presented, or 'framed'. In a central choice paradigm, decision-makers seem to adopt different preferences, and different attitudes to risk, depending on whether the options speci…
Teaching & learning guide for
An influential program of psychological research suggests that people's judgements and decisions depend on the way in which information is presented, or ‘framed’. In a central choice paradigm, decision-makers seem to adopt different preferences, and different attitudes to risk, depending on whether the options specify the number of people who will be saved or the corresponding number who will die. It is standardly assumed that such responses viol…
The occasional maverick of analytic tradecraft
Roughly a decade ago, in a commissioned report I wrote for the US National Research Council’s Committee on Behavioral and Social Science Research to Improve Intelligence Analysis for National Secur
Corruption in Russian higher education
(2020). Corruption in Russian higher education. Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe: Vol. 28, Civil Society under Pressure: Historical Legacies and Current Responses in Central Eastern Europe, pp. 77-84
Primitive Accumulation in Post-Soviet Russia
Starting from the Marxist concept of “primitive accumulation,” the process by which the toilers are forcefully separated from the means of production in the origins of capitalism, this article analyzes the role of the state in the process of capitalist restoration in Russia following the demise of the Soviet Union. The concrete form that that process assumed, the nature of the bourgeoisie and the type of capitalism the emerged from it, provide in…
Geopolitical Forecasting Skill in Strategic Intelligence
Extending research by the authors on intelligence forecasting, the forecasting skill of 3622 geopolitical forecasts extracted from strategic intelligence reports was examined. The codable subset of forecasts ( N = 2013) was expressed with verbal probabilities (e.g., likely) and translated to numeric probability equivalents. This subset showed very good calibration and discrimination, but also underconfidence. There was no support for the hypothes…
On the historical legitimacy of the October Revolution
Este artigo discute a questão da legitimidade histórica da Revolução de Outubro. Foi ela um ato arbitrário, realizado à revelia do povo, que desviou a Rússia de sua via normal de desenvol-vimento em direção a uma democracia liberal? Essa é a posição dominante hoje na historiografia, defendida tam-bém pelo governo russo. Ou, ao con-trário, foi uma revolução popular, com raízes profundas na história e na socie-dade russa
The conflict in Ukraine
The conflict in Ukraine has multiple dimensions – international, political, socio-economic, cultural, ideological – that interact in complex ways. Moreover, its analysis is further complicated by t
Is the World Deteriorating
THE WORLD IS BECOMING A LESS CONFLICT-RIDDEN PLACE, AND IT HAS BEEN for decades. Wars and violent conflicts are on the decline, according to expert consensus. In particular, we note abundant evidence that suggests that the is not deteriorating from Steven Pinker's conclusion of a long-term general decline in global violence (1) to Azar Gat's analysis pointing to a decline in war since the mid-1990s (2) to the 2013 Human Security Report proclaimin…
When Does Framing Influence Preferences, Risk Perceptions, and Risk Attitudes? The Explicated Valence Account
When faced with an expected loss and a choice between a sure option and a risky option, the gain–loss framing of the problem has been shown to influence option preference. According to prospect theory, this framing effect is the result of contradictory attitudes about risks involving gains and losses. This article develops and tests an alternative explicated valence account (EVA), which proposes that preference reversals are caused by differences…
How Just Were America's Wars? A Survey of Experts Using a Just War Index
To what degree were the wars waged by the United States ethically just? The answer is necessarily subjective, but would experts from across the political spectrum score conflicts in a similar fashion? In a survey of more than 100 international studies experts, the 18 major conflicts fought by the United States since 1900 were assessed. World War II was rated as the most just, whereas the Iraq Invasion was considered the most unjust. Respondents a…
The ultimate sacrifice
Honor is a central concept in the profession of arms. The present study of 2,254 Canadian Forces (CF) members examined how they viewed the honor of their peers at ranks below, at, or above their own. Although rank is itself a form of vertical honor, participants’ mean assessments of honor were inversely related to these relative-rank distinctions. As well, averaged across vertical honor, the assessed honor of other CF members directly predicted t…
Counterfactual thinking and ascriptions of cause and preventability
Research suggests that counterfactuals (i.e., thoughts of how things might have been different) play an important role in determining the perceived cause of a target outcome. Results from 3 scenario studies indicate that counterfactual content overlapped primarily with thoughts of how an outcome might have been prevented (preventability ascriptions) rather than with thoughts of how it might have been caused (causal ascriptions). Counterfactuals a…
An evaluation of post-adoption services
What I did” versus “what I might have done”
Economic Transactions among Friends
Two experiments tested the idea that economic transactions among friends are influenced by a norm of generosity. Whereas a fairness norm ought to promote agreement in offers between buyers and sellers, a generosity norm should promote altruistic disagreements caused by sellers offering lower prices than buyers—a reversal of the well-known endowment effect. Supporting the present account, in both studies, offers among friends showed a reversal of …
Effects of social density in university residential environments
The Rebirth of the Soviet Labor Movement
Analyse de la greve qui a lieu du 10 au 24 juillet 1989 dans les quatre principales mines de charbon en URSS et a laquelle ont participe environ 400 000 mineurs. Cet evenement, fortement a l'origine de la perestroika et de l'effondrement du systeme communiste etait la demonstration meme du desaveu violent de la bureaucratie et d'un systeme faisant de la population un facteur residuel
Solidarity
Taboo or tragic
Insights into the accuracy of social scientists' forecasts of societal change
American and Chinese Public Opinion in an Era of Great Power Competition
As the US-China great power competition intensifies, public opinion polling may help gauge internal drivers of foreign policy decision-making. Using Pew Research Center data, the authors analyzed how American and Chinese respondents viewed their own and each other's countries between 2008–2016. They further examined how American attitudes towards China varied by political affiliation between 2008–2019. Both Americans and the Chinese displayed ing…
When Does Framing Influence Preferences, Risk Perceptions, and Risk Attitudes? The Explicated Valence Account
When faced with an expected loss and a choice between a sure option and a risky option, the gain–loss framing of the problem has been shown to influence option preference. According to prospect theory, this framing effect is the result of contradictory attitudes about risks involving gains and losses. This article develops and tests an alternative explicated valence account (EVA), which proposes that preference reversals are caused by differences…
Public but not private ego threat triggers aggression in narcissists
One line of research indicates that people are more aggressive when they are insulted publicly rather than privately, whereas another indicates that subclinical narcissism predicts aggression. Drawing on these lines of research, we predicted that aggression would be increased among participants who scored higher on narcissism (as opposed to lower), received negative (as opposed to positive) self‐relevant feedback, and did so in public (as opposed…
Arithmetic computation with probability words and numbers
Probability information is regularly communicated to experts who must fuse multiple estimates to support decision making. Such information is often communicated verbally (e.g., “likely”) rather than with precise numeric (point) values (e.g., “.75”), yet people are not taught to perform arithmetic on verbal probabilities. We hypothesized that the accuracy and logical coherence of averaging and multiplying probabilities will be poorer when individu…
Risky-choice framing and rational decision-making
This article surveys the latest research on risky-choice framing effects, focusing on the implications for rational decision-making. An influential program of psychological research suggests that people's judgements and decisions depend on the way in which information is presented, or 'framed'. In a central choice paradigm, decision-makers seem to adopt different preferences, and different attitudes to risk, depending on whether the options speci…
The ultimate sacrifice
Honor is a central concept in the profession of arms. The present study of 2,254 Canadian Forces (CF) members examined how they viewed the honor of their peers at ranks below, at, or above their own. Although rank is itself a form of vertical honor, participants’ mean assessments of honor were inversely related to these relative-rank distinctions. As well, averaged across vertical honor, the assessed honor of other CF members directly predicted t…
Managed democracy”
The Obedience Alibi
Stanley Milgram’s work on obedience to authority is social psychology’s most influential contribution to theorizing about Holocaust perpetration. The gist of Milgram’s claims is that Holocaust perpetrators were just following orders out of a sense of obligation to their superiors. Milgram, however, never undertook a scholarly analysis of how his obedience experiments related to the Holocaust. The author first discusses the major theoretical limit…
Integrative Complexity in Reasoning About the Persian Gulf War and the Accountability to Skeptical Audience Hypothesis
Given earlier polling reports, it was predicted that (a) a majority of Canadian subjects would support the U.S. military intervention in the Persian Gulf crisis and (b) following Tetlock's (1983) accountability‐to‐skeptical‐audience hypothesis, these subjects would display lower levels of integrative complexity in reasoning about the causes of the Gulf War than subjects who indicated opposition to the U.S. action. As expected, a significantly gre…
Meta‐informational cue inconsistency and judgment of information accuracy
Meta‐information is information about information that can be used as cues to guide judgments and decisions. Three types of meta‐information that are routinely used in intelligence analysis are source reliability, information credibility, and classification level. The first two cues are intended to speak to information quality (in particular, the probability that the information is accurate), and classification level is intended to describe the i…
Geopolitical Forecasting Skill in Strategic Intelligence
Extending research by the authors on intelligence forecasting, the forecasting skill of 3622 geopolitical forecasts extracted from strategic intelligence reports was examined. The codable subset of forecasts ( N = 2013) was expressed with verbal probabilities (e.g., likely) and translated to numeric probability equivalents. This subset showed very good calibration and discrimination, but also underconfidence. There was no support for the hypothes…
How Just Were America's Wars? A Survey of Experts Using a Just War Index
To what degree were the wars waged by the United States ethically just? The answer is necessarily subjective, but would experts from across the political spectrum score conflicts in a similar fashion? In a survey of more than 100 international studies experts, the 18 major conflicts fought by the United States since 1900 were assessed. World War II was rated as the most just, whereas the Iraq Invasion was considered the most unjust. Respondents a…
Risky discounts
Predicting blame assignment in a case of negligent harm
A Market without Thorns”
The miners' strike of July 1989 marked the emergence of the working class as an active political force, whose attitude toward the reform of the economic system will be a decisive factor in determining the shape of Soviet society for years to come. The appearance of a workers' movement, for the first time in over sixty years, has given rise to an intense ideological struggle for its allegiance among liberals of different shades, partisans of a ref…
Red Petrograd
Changing Art, Changing Man
A Modern Book of Aesthetics
Modern Man Looks at Evolution
Art and Anarchy
Effects of social density in university residential environments
The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime
Ecia Chapter 2
Solidarity
Red Petrograd
La réalité socialiste—crise, adaptation, progrèsMarie Lavigne et Wladimir Andreff (études coordonnées par) Paris
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Pérestroïka et classe ouvrière
Le but général de cet article est d'examiner l'affirmation sur la neutralité de classe de la réforme actuellement appliquée en URSS. Bien que cette réforme ne réalise pas l'extension marchande préconisée par des économistes comme Shmelev, elle est, néanmoins inspirée par ce modèle et considérée comme un pas dans cette direction. Ainsi, A. Aganbeguian, proche conseiller économique de Gorbatchev, a admis que de son point de vue, la réforme adoptée …
Impressions of Perestroika
The following is a slightly edited version of a diary kept by David Mandel during the summer of 1988 when he visited the Soviet Union on an academic exchange. Mandel; who teaches political science at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, is fluent in Russian and has made several trips to the USSR over the past years. Some of the early results of his research on the perestroika (restructuring) and the Soviet working class have been published in The…
A Market without Thorns”
The miners' strike of July 1989 marked the emergence of the working class as an active political force, whose attitude toward the reform of the economic system will be a decisive factor in determining the shape of Soviet society for years to come. The appearance of a workers' movement, for the first time in over sixty years, has given rise to an intense ideological struggle for its allegiance among liberals of different shades, partisans of a ref…
The Rebirth of the Soviet Labor Movement
Analyse de la greve qui a lieu du 10 au 24 juillet 1989 dans les quatre principales mines de charbon en URSS et a laquelle ont participe environ 400 000 mineurs. Cet evenement, fortement a l'origine de la perestroika et de l'effondrement du systeme communiste etait la demonstration meme du desaveu violent de la bureaucratie et d'un systeme faisant de la population un facteur residuel
Actually Existing Privatization
Yurii Marenich, a Ph.D. in economics, is a section director at the Central Institute of Mathematics and Economics of the Academy of Science sof the (former) USSR. He was elected to the October District Soviet of People's Deputies in Moscow in March 1990, and is a member of the soviet's praesidium and chairman of its Economic Commission. This interview was conducted in Moscow on October 27, 1991 and has been translated from Russian by David Mandel…
An Uncertain Future
10 p
Integrative Complexity in Reasoning About the Persian Gulf War and the Accountability to Skeptical Audience Hypothesis
Given earlier polling reports, it was predicted that (a) a majority of Canadian subjects would support the U.S. military intervention in the Persian Gulf crisis and (b) following Tetlock's (1983) accountability‐to‐skeptical‐audience hypothesis, these subjects would display lower levels of integrative complexity in reasoning about the causes of the Gulf War than subjects who indicated opposition to the U.S. action. As expected, a significantly gre…
Chaos theory, sensitive dependence, and the logistic equation
Chaos theory, sensitive dependence, and the logistic equation
Counterfactual thinking and ascriptions of cause and preventability
Research suggests that counterfactuals (i.e., thoughts of how things might have been different) play an important role in determining the perceived cause of a target outcome. Results from 3 scenario studies indicate that counterfactual content overlapped primarily with thoughts of how an outcome might have been prevented (preventability ascriptions) rather than with thoughts of how it might have been caused (causal ascriptions). Counterfactuals a…
The Obedience Alibi
Stanley Milgram’s work on obedience to authority is social psychology’s most influential contribution to theorizing about Holocaust perpetration. The gist of Milgram’s claims is that Holocaust perpetrators were just following orders out of a sense of obligation to their superiors. Milgram, however, never undertook a scholarly analysis of how his obedience experiments related to the Holocaust. The author first discusses the major theoretical limit…
Revolution, Counterrevolution and the Working Class in Russia
Managed democracy”
What I did” versus “what I might have done”
Economic Transactions among Friends
Two experiments tested the idea that economic transactions among friends are influenced by a norm of generosity. Whereas a fairness norm ought to promote agreement in offers between buyers and sellers, a generosity norm should promote altruistic disagreements caused by sellers offering lower prices than buyers—a reversal of the well-known endowment effect. Supporting the present account, in both studies, offers among friends showed a reversal of …
Political science (36 works) · Psychology (30 works) · Law (22 works) · Social Psychology (21 works) · Economics (18 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Politics (12 works)