Just got a copy of The Affect Effect, a book about affect and it's role in political behavior. Most people who know me as a budding political scientist know that when it comes to political science, I am interested primarily in political behavior, rather than the political institutions we have created. More specifically, I'm interested in voting behavior: How and why do people make the decision to vote or not to vote? How do people decide who to vote for? Are these processes rationally driven? If not, what are the normative implications of their decision processes?
Affect is our gut reaction to something, either positive or negative. What causes affect and how it influences our decision-making processes are questions that I personally find very interesting. Responding to affect isn't always logical or rational and sometimes people aren't even aware that they are doing it. As a result, it can be a tricky thing to empirically study.
Anyways, I plan to read the book when I'm done with school in a few weeks during my month long hiatus from things academic dominating my time (along with a whole shelf-full of other books that I need to get to). I'll post a review, but I'm guessing it's going to be a good book. I love stuff that looks at decision-making, either from an affective or rational perspective (one of my favorite pieces of work in all of social science is Kahneman and Tversky's work on prospect theory. Read their original 1979 piece: "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk" here).
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