The Language of War: A Conceptual Replication and Extension of Abe (2012) and Matsumoto and Hwang (2013)

Abstract

Legislative bodies have very important roles and understanding the psychology of their decision-making processes is a useful area of study. We add to this area by replicating two previous studies: Abe (2012) and Matsumoto and Hwang (2013) in the context of a legislative body. The present study hypothesized that legislators who support war measures would be externally focused and less cognitively complex in their speeches, while opponents of war measures would be internally focused. Speeches were obtained pertaining to the decisions for the U.S. to take military action in Kosovo, Iraq, and Libya. While we found mixed results depending on the circumstances of a specific conflict, we demonstrate how automated language analysis can be combined with voting records to better understand behavioral action, such as legislative decision.