Ray Pingree

I study causal relationships between reasoning, interpersonal
discussion, mass communication, and decision quality.  Most of my
research has been on political reasoning in efforts to more clearly
theorize and experimentally test claims that communication of reasons will produce better decisions, both at the group level (deliberation) and in a whole society (deliberative democracy).  I am also interested in these same questions in organizational contexts.  Acknowledging organizational deliberation makes certain non-deliberative tendencies observed in political reasoning seem much less like inevitable failings of human nature.  Organizations, and particularly democratic ones, may also provide a better proving ground than politics for testing other, more general problems in deliberation such as the problem of scale, which is the question of how a large group of people who want to reason together can coherently and efficiently do so.  In many organizations, people actually want to put their heads together, and the central problem is instead how to structure their interaction.  In my work on this problem I have used my background as a former software engineer to actually create a new form of online deliberation that extends certain theoretical ideal properties of deliberation to much larger groups.  In general, I think the real importance of the Internet is its potential for theory-driven efforts to create something new online; offline communication should not be the gold standard.  Finally, I am interested in improving the basic conceptual tools we use to construct causal explanations of communication processes across all areas of communication theory, particularly by theorizing what happens after knowledge activation (e.g. reasoning) and by including effects of messages on their senders in our implicit and explicit models of communication effects.