One of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election was the strength and resilience of the belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Scholars have suggested that this belief was the result of a campaign of false information and innuendo from the Bush administration. We call this the information environment explanation. Using a technique of “challenge interviews” on a sample of voters who reported believing in a link between Saddam and 9/11, we propose instead a social psychological explanation for the belief in this link. We identify a number of social psychological mechanisms voters use to maintain false beliefs in the face of disconfirming information, and we show that for a subset of voters the main reason to believe in the link was that it made sense of the administration's decision to go to war against Iraq. We call this inferred justification: for these voters, the fact of the war led to a search for a justification for it, which led them to infer the existence of ties between Iraq and 9/11.

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Prostitution as a cultural practice describes the line between what must be given as a gift and what may be exchanged as a commodity; an investigation of prostitution can therefore further our understanding of the ideological underpinnings of commodity exchange. This study uses interviews with prostitutes' clients to show how commodity exchange can be understood as being morally superior to gift exchange. The interviewees praise "market exchange" of sexfor lacking the ambiguity, status-dependence, and potential hypocrisy that they see in the "gift exchange" of sex characteristic of romantic relationships. This justification of market exchange suggests that theories of the "moral economy" that posit a dichotomy between "premarket" and "market" societies understate the degree to which market societies are,for their participants, also moral economies: they are economies embodying moral beliefs about individual autonomy, democratic equality, and unambiguous and nondiscretionary fulfillment of obligations. Critics of the market do themselves a disservice in ignoring the powerful moral appeals of market exchange. More generally, sociological analyses that pit "norms" against "self-interest" ignore the ways in which norms can enable as well as constrain self-interested market behavior.Sociological analyses of prostitution tend to concentrate on the role of the prostitute and neglect the role of the customer, or "john." In the last thirty years, of the hundreds of books and articles written on the sociology of prostitution, fewer than ten have systematically examined the role of the customer.1 This neglect of one of the central parties to the transaction is unfortunate for several reasons. First, it echoes the double standard in law enforcement that still finds prostitutes being arrested about four times more often than customers, even though, since professional prostitutes have fifteen to twenty clients per week (McLeod 1982), there are many more customers than prostitutes and thus many more men than women involved in "sex-related crimes." Second, neglect of the "demand" side of the transaction naturalizes this demand, making it seem to be a biologically * Direct all correspondence to: