Advances in the social sciences are used to uncover cognitive foundations of social decision making.

1. Beyond rationality: reason and the study of politics Arthur Lupia, Mathew D. McCubbins and Samuel L. Popkin; Part I. External Elements of Reason: 2. Shared mental models: ideologies and institutions Arthur T. Denzau and Douglass C. North; 3. The institutional foundations of political competence: how citizens learn what they need to know Arthur Lupia and Mathew D. McCubbins; 4. Taking sides: a fixed choice theory of political reasoning Paul Sniderman; 5. How people reason about ethics Norman Frohlich and Joe Oppenheimer; 6. Who says what? Source credibility as a mediator of campaign advertising Shanto Iyengar and Nicholas A. Valentino; 7. Affect as information: the role of public mood in political reasoning Wendy M. Rahn; Part II. Internal Elements of Reason: 8. Reconsidering the rational public: cognition, heuristics, and mass opinion James H. Kuklinski and Paul J. Quirk; 9. Three steps toward a theory of motivated political reasoning Milton Lodge and Charles Taber; 10. Knowledge, trust, and international reasoning Samuel L. Popkin and Michael A. Dimock; 11. Coping with tradeoffs: psychological constraints and political implications Philip E. Tetlock; 12. Backstage cognition in reason and choice Mark Turner; 13. Constructing a theory of reasoning: choice, constraints, and context Arthur Lupia, Mathew D. McCubbins and Samuel L. Popkin.