Patterns , Thinking , and Cognition : A Theory of Judgment

Howard Margolis, a senior lecturer with the Committee on Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago, adds cognition to the necessary ingredients to explain public behavior. A theme of the book is that rulefollowing processes "must be reduced pattern recognition, not the reverse" (p. 4). That is, interests plus logic are not sufficient to account for judgment; P-cognition, or the mechanisms involved in pattern recognition, also plays a role. Needless to say, I was impressed that a person within the perspective of the political sciences would arrive at an interpretation similar to one that has emerged in experimental psychology. Of course, Margolis is not the first to claim that pattern recognition is central to thinking. Loosely speaking, the Gestalt psychologists must have had a similar notion in mind, as have investigators in more current studies of game playing, medical diagnosis, and language processing. If pattern recognition is central to thinking, then complex behavior can be understood in terms of the information available to the thinker and how