Soviet-American Dialogue in the Social Sciences Research Workshops on Interdependence Among Nations (1990) / Chapter Skim
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Motives and Models of Cooperation: A Soviet View of American Contributions
Motives and Models of Cooperation: A Soviet View of American Contributions
Pages 22-34
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From page 22... ...
On the political plane, there is evidence not only of the increased complexity in the structure of interdependency relations in the modern world, but also of the promotion of the concept of interdependence in political thought and rhetoric hence the timeliness of research on interdependence. On a strictly academic plane, the breadth and multifaceted nature of the problem of interdependence provide a welcome basis for productive interdisciplinary synthesis and the comparison and interaction of various research methods, as evidenced in the two workshops.
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From page 23... ...
The experiment is aimed at drawing into its orbit representatives of various social and behavioral sciences, contributing to overcoming prejudices and false stereotypes, forming the elements of a transnational scientific-academic community, and modifying something in those areas of science that have the most direct influence on social consciousness and on the process by which countries create images of one another. What can be learned from this experiment?
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From page 24... ...
This is occurring, for the most part, because many important problems, such as ecology, military spending, ethnic conflicts, interference in regional conflicts, and the like, are becoming subject to public debate and personal opinion under glasnost. Empirical research on public opinion, for example, is already a basis for academic discussion as well as political debate.Cooperation with American scientists in social research will be especially important in facilitating the adoption of internationally recognized research methods for producing reliable and trustworthy empirical data.
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From page 25... ...
This logic is a hybrid of descriptive and generative logics of metascientific investigation. That is, we identify key questions addressed in the workshops and then discuss the answers proposed by the American participants and the methods they use for producing those answers.
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From page 26... ...
The game is conducted between two players; The choice of action is between cooperation and conflict; The structure of the payoffs is that of the Prisoner's Dilemma game; 4. The shadow of the future must be long a game typically lasts hundreds of plays in Axelrod's studies and its point of termination must not be known in advance to the participants; Each player knows the history of the game- that is, every previous move is presumed to have been accurately perceived;
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From page 27... ...
; and 8. Cooperative strategies can become established in a "population" of noncooperative strategies only in a cluster (cooperative strategies are able to avoid extinction only when they have more than random associations with each other, since only in such cases do the payoffs from cooperation outweigh the initial losses inflicted by noncooperators)
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From page 28... ...
One can find similarities between this paper and some Soviet contributions dealing with concept analysis. In our view, Stern is absolutely right when he posits that through detailed and thorough analysis of the concepts used to interpret political reality, it becomes possible to establish productive interaction between rather sophisticated methods of international law, philosophy, logic, and even linguistic semantics, on the one hand, and traditional, informal historical-political research, on the other.
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From page 29... ...
The evolution of Tetlock's text-analytic method followed the same path that 10 years earlier led to the creation of the cognitive mapping technique. Techniques from a-psycholinguistic experiment designed to measure the conceptual complexity of an individual's thinking under laboratory conditions were adapted to measure complexity using "natural" texts drawn from the media, press releases, speeches, and other political documents.
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From page 30... ...
and the temporal relationship of language to policy: changes in Soviet cognitive complexity tend to precede changes in Soviet policy, while changes in American complexity tend to coincide temporarily with policy changes. In addition, the covariation of political impression-management variables, actions, and perceptual-cognitive variables depends on the ideological preferences of the political leadership, on changes of leadership (even if ideology does not change substantially)
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From page 31... ...
Gamson's paper is the only one at the workshops to present a theoIy of mass communication, a field highly developed in the United States but embryonic in the Soviet Union. As part of cooperation within the workshop framework, such a possibility indicates the great potential for conducting comparative metascientific research.
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From page 32... ...
For instance, it would be interesting to examine whether the environmental discourse in the USSR is in some sense dependent upon an analogous debate in the United States and, if so, what the concrete mechanisms of the dependence are. We can also consider the adoption by Soviet mass communication theorists of sampling and empirical data-gathering standards developed in the United States.
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From page 33... ...
If Third World countries are to develop civil societies more or less of a Western type, they should no longer be objects of East-West rivalry in the bipolar world. Tilly's research stands out from the other American research presented in the workshops and demonstrates at least stylistically
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From page 34... ...
34 SOY7ET-AMERICAN DIALOGUE IN THE SOCL,4L SCIENCES an unexpected closeness to Soviet research on the problems of developing countries. Thus, it opens a variety of prospects for comparison and possible cooperation.
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