The Actor's Attention Space Case Study

Crisiscom attempted to simulate not just the results of human information processing, but also the process itself. On July 25th 1914, the start date of the simulation, the two actors had no messages or events in their ‘attention space,’ but each had a static affect matrix that determined his pre-conscious attitude towards incoming information. In the model, a decision maker receives information about the environment, and then “incorporates this information [into his attention space] in ways which are a function of his own cognitive structure and sociopsychological processes”. A series of biases – quantified using the affect matrix – governed how actors understood their elected messages in addition to the type of messages that actors received into their attention spaces. Each day, 200 messages were fed into each actor’s environment. Some messages were available to both actors, and some only to one. These messages were collected from the daily newspapers of the simulated actors’ home nations as well as from academic work on the Sarajevo crisis. Several messages from newspapers didn 't have much bearing on the impending outbreak of World War I – the message “British government buys a Rembrandt,” for example, was not assigned much importance by either actor.

Crisiscom limited an actor’s ‘attention space’ to seven categories, each consisting of seven messages. A category might be “Russian-French Relations” and a message with that might be “Russia revokes its ambassador from Paris.” At the end of the week in which Crisiscom was tested, the Kaiser and the Tsar had different issues on their minds, and a different worldview in their