The October War: Changes in Cognitive Orientation toward the Middle East Conflict

In this paper we will examine adjustments that foreign policy officials make in their thinking to accommodate new information. In 1971–1972 and again in 1974–1975 a sample of American foreign policy officials was interviewed about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Cognitive maps constructed from the interviews were used to simulate reactions of the policy officials to the October 1973 war. A comparison of simulations based on the pre-war and the post-war maps shows that there was almost no restructuring of beliefs. The conflict reinforced the views of some officials, while it led others to perceive certain concepts as having a negative rather than a positive effect on their values.