ITHIN the behavioral sciences, most research assumes that V rationality is a commonly shared attribute of mankind -that the defining characteristic of humans is their ability to examine alternatives, estimate their consequences, and then select one which allows them to achieve their goals. While pure rationalitywith its assumptions of perfect information, a complete set of preference orderings, and unlimited computational abilityhas been subjected to devastating criticism, even theories of bounded rationality assume that subjects obtain reasonably accurate information concerning the more important consequences of a few alternatives before making decisions

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Most studies of belief congruence between elites and their constituencies have dealt with a single type of political institution, such as legislatures, political parties, or bureaucracies. This article compares the extent of congruence between governmental and interest group elites with their constituencies. After discussing elites' incentives to appeal both to their very broad "claimed" constituency and to a much narrower "activist" constituency, we suggest a number of reasons for hypothesizing that governmental elites will do a better job than interest group leaders of mirroring the beliefs of their broader "Claimed" Constituency. Survey data from a number of governmental and interest group elites involved in a longstanding environmental dispute at Lake Tahoe generally support this contention.

In the current research, when normal subjects briefly perceived a word that was death-related, they were less likely to express any self-awareness that they were perceiving a meaningful word. Moreover, when they subsequently remembered such a death word, they were more likely to confuse it with a mentally imaged word. In contrast, when mildly depressed subjects briefly perceived a death-related word, they failed to attentuate their self-awareness that they were perceiving, and subsequently, they failed to mistake the death-related word for a previously imaged word. These results suggest that normal people successfully ‘repress’ the grim realities of death, whereas depressed people fail to suppress the self-conscious ‘monitoring’ of such dismal realities.

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