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- All Subjects: decision-making
- Creators: Lennon, Tara
Inspired by John Rawls and his life's work Justice as Fairness, I sought to measure how much political empathy a person has and then compare this to decision-making styles in search of any relation between the two. Political empathy is a term to refer to one's willingness to utilize governmental policy to help those who are the neediest because of the understanding that humans deserve equal treatment since no one is more human than anyone else. Because of current research I found that I can test political empathy because of empathy’s correlation with political ideology; specifically, that those who are more liberal have more empathy. I test participant’s ideology in a normal setting and then present them with the concept of Rawls’ Original Position to see if they shift more one way when presented with this idea which is supposed to make them think more empathetically.<br/>I have two hypothesis that I cover: first, that more people will shift in a more liberal direction between the two tests, and second, that those who have more political empathy make political decisions based more on emotion rather than facts and reason. I tested decision-making through a myriad of tests within a focus group so I could get multiple angles at the issue. My first hypothesis was proven incorrect and while I didn’t have enough participants in my focus groups to make a clear determination, it didn’t look like there was any correlation between political ideology and decision-making styles.
This study draws from three phases of research set in the context of urban development, where images of the future are generated by architects and circulated by built environment professionals to affect client and public decision-making. I begin with a systematic review of professional design literature to identify norms related to visualization. I then conduct in-depth interviews with expert architects to draw out how visualization technologies are used to influence client decision-making. I dive into how different tools manage the future and generate different forms of certainty, uncertainty, persuasion, and risk. Complementing the review and interviews is a case study on ASU at Mesa City Center, a development project aimed at revitalizing downtown Mesa, Arizona. Analysis highlights how project-specific visual tools affect decision-making and the role that client imagination and inference play in understanding and preference. This research unpacks the social, technical, and emotional knowledge embedded in visualization technologies and reveals how they affect decision-making. Information about the future is uniquely mediated by each technology with decision-making bound up in larger sociopolitical processes aimed at reducing uncertainty, building trust, and managing expectations. This suggests that the visual tools we use to depict the future are much more dynamic and influential than they are given credit for.