Psychology and Decision making
in Foreign Policy
January 28, 2014
Overview
Commonsensical understandings of
rationality
Ideal and limits
Psychological models: the ‘cognitive
revolution’
Neuroscience, emotion, and
computation
Why rationality?
Traditional approaches to IR
Decisions “should” be made rationally
Foreign policy actors all assumed to be
rational actors
Commonsensical understanding of
rationality: two models
1) Rational decision-making: the process that
people “should” use to make choices:
intuitively ranked preferences
 effectively pay attention to, evaluate and adapt
to new information
 weigh consequences
logical and discriminating, while open to new
evidence (in their choices)
coherent and consistent in responding to logical
arguments.
2) Subjective probability estimates: even more
demanding version of rationality that expects
decision makers to be able effectively estimate
probabilities:
Generate estimates of the consequences of
their choices based opinions and past
experience (no formal calculations)
Update these estimates with new evidence
Work maximize their expected utility (benefit)
Appeal of using rational choice models
Help identify the choice leaders “should”
make
Assume actors all use instrumental
rationality, so…
Don’t have to worry about leaders’
preferences or expectations
Limits of commonsensical
understanding of rationality
Can’t explain the beliefs and expectations
which lead to choice,
a crucial missing variable in explaining foreign
policy
Don’t help much in understanding the
process of foreign policy decision-making
because unfortunately evidence shows we
rarely make decisions that way.
Must examine the limits to rationality
Evidence from psychology and
neuroscience challenges the fundamental
tenets of the rational model:
Humans rarely conform to ‘rational’
expectations
Psychological models:
the ‘cognitive revolution’
 Four attributes compromise humans’ capacity for
rational choice:
1. Simplicity
2. Consistency
3. Poor estimators
4. Loss aversion
Simplicity
 In order to make complex decision, decision
makers need to find ways to order and simplify
information
 Use of analogies and analogical reasoning is
common tool to help simplify things
Tendency to draw simple one-to-one
analogies without qualifying conditions
 Implications for FP?
Simplicity
 Problem - we tend to be very bad at
oversimplifying
Lose the nuances and subtleties of the
context
Pushes other options of the table and can
blind decision makers to possible
consequences of their choice
Example
First Iraq war (1991)
Saddam as Hitler
Provides script for how to respond to
invasion of Kuwait
But doesn’t allow for examination of how
to situations are different.
Consistency
Idea that people don’t like inconsistency,
so have tendency to discount or deny
inconsistent information in order preserve
their beliefs
Counter evidence can actually harden the
original belief
“I wasn’t almost wrong, I was almost right”
Tetlock & belief system defences
Argue that local conditions didn’t meet
conditions required for the prediction
prediction not wrong the conditions weren’t right
Invoking the unexpected occurrence of a
shock
 prediction wasn’t the problem, the unexpected
occurred
Close-call: I was almost right
Tetlock & belief system defences
Timing was off
Prediction was just ahead of time, history will
show it was correct
International politics is unpredictable
Problem isn’t the prediction, just the nature of
IR
Made the “right mistake” and would do it
again
Unlikely things sometimes happen
More confident the person is in the
prediction, the more threatening counter
evidence is
More likely to resort to one the 7 belief
system defences
‘defensive cognitions’
Implications for FP?
Implications from consistency
When most need to revise their
judgements is exactly when they may be
least open to it.
E.g. US decision makers during Vietnam
war
Solutions to consistency
People tend to change their beliefs
incrementally
Make the smallest change possible
Counter evidence hardest to ignore when
comes in large batches
Can’t ignore this and can cause dramatic shifts
Beliefs with relatively short-term
consequences are easier to change
Implications for FP?
Poor estimators
Tendency to think causally rather than pay
attention to the frequency of events
E.g. - easy to imagine the causal
pathway to war so tend to overestimate
its likelihood
Don’t like uncertainty so tend to seek false
certainty
 Use ‘heuristics’- short cuts, “rules of thumb” to
make it easier to process information:
Availability - tendency to interpret based on
what is most available in their cognitive
repertoire
Representativeness- tendency to exaggerate
similarities between one event and another
Anchoring - grab on to an initial value and
stick to it
 Fundamental attribution error- tendency to
exaggerate the importance of the other’s
disposition in explaining something they did,
while explaining own behaviour based on
situational constraints
I.e. their bad behaviour is because they are bad people,
our bad behaviour is because of the situation we were in
 hindsight bias- misremember what we
predicted to be closer to the outcome than it was
 Implications for FP?
Loss aversion
 Tendency to see loss as more painful than a
comparable gain is pleasant
 So overvalue losses compared to gains
 Willing to take greater risks to reverse a loss
Relatively risk adverse when things are going
good and relatively risk acceptant when things
are going badly
 Implications for foreign policy?
Neuroscience, emotion, and computation
 New imaging technology of the human brain
suggests that many decisions are not the
result of deliberative thought processes, but
the product of
1. preconscious neurological processes
2. strong emotional responses
 Both incorporate subconscious actions and
decisions in progress, with the conscious
brain playing catch-up
Impact on foreign policy decisionmaking
 Reflective, deliberative, rational decisionmaking (underlying much in FPA) fits poorly
with the cumulative body of evidence of how
humans choose.
 Emotion precedes conditions and follows
choice; they influence decisions
we feel before we think and often act before we think
 Choice is a conflict between emotion and
computation.
Emotional vs cognitive decision-making
 Emotion-based system of decision-making
(intuitive): preconscious, automatic, fast,
effortless, associative, unreflective, slow to
change
 Cognitive decision-making(reasoned):
conscious, slow, effortful, reflective, rulegoverned, flexible
 Vast majority of decisions made via emotional
system; and tough for cognitive to ‘educate’ the
emotional
‘The Ultimatum Game’: How would you choose?
‘The Ultimatum Game’
 The game has been played across a wide range
of situations and cultures, and
 player 2 rejected less than 20% of the total
offers because it found the offer humiliating.
Fear and anger in decisions
Research demonstrates:
fear prompts uncertainty and risk-averse
action,
anger prompts certainty and riskacceptance.
Implications for FP?
Conclusion
Rational decision-making useful as:
an aspiration or norm, aware that
foreign policy makers rarely meet that
norm
contains counter-intuitive and nonobvious paradoxes that would be
instructive if known by decision-makers
Conclusion
 Can still use rational models, but need to use
them with evidence from psychology and
neuroscience.
 Policy leaders need to be aware of the
dynamics of choice.
 Foreign policymakers are no less biased than
other people, whose choice-making is
preconscious and strongly influenced by
emotion.
Conclusion
 Learning and change is still possible
We aren’t hostage to these tendencies
 Key challenge is to understand, far better,
how and when emotions are engaged, when
they improve decisions, and how emotions
engage with reflection and reasoning.