Political Psychology and Foreign Policy

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Political Psychology and Foreign Policy

• Lecture 11 4/14/2005
• PSC 337, Political Psychology
• Instructor Tobias Van Assche

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Outline

• Why use psychology to understand foreign policy
  analysis?
• Stress and Hostage crises
• Individual level factors
• Threat Perception
• Cognitive biases
• Motivational biases
• Loss aversion, Framing, and Risk propensity
• Group dynamics
• Exercise Thirteen Days

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Why Psychology in Foreign Policy analysis?

• impact of psychological factors on judgment and
  decision making by political leaders.
• Nature of Foreign policy decision making
• Other variables that affect FP.
• Relative power
• Nature of the other countries (democracies)
• Domestic constituencies
• Bureaucratic Politics.
• Psychological factors are not sufficient but are
  they necessary?

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Stress and Hostage Crises (Hermann, 1990)

• Conditions of Hostage Crises
• Effects of stress on decision making
• Stress vs. Performance Inversed U-shape
• Ways of coping with stress
• Withdraw from the situation
• Defensive avoidance
• Take the situation on
• Hypervigilance
• Panic complete immobilization of cognitive and
  physical systems.
• Stress accentuates a persons decision making
  style.

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Examples Carter, Reagan and Hostages.

• Carter
• Iran hostage Crisis (1979-1980)
• Hypervigilant
• Reagan
• Lebanon hostage crisis
• Defensive avoidance shifting Responsibility

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Individual-level factors
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Threat Perception

• Biases and errors can be based on cognitive
  biases and motivational errors.
• Cognitive biases
• based on shortcuts and heuristics.
• Used to create some order in a complex world.
• Motivational Biases
• Focuses on individuals psychological needs,
  fears, guilt, shame stress, and desires.

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Cognitive Biases and foreign policy analysis

• Beliefs of nature of the adversary might
  influence your response to their actions.
• Bad faith model
• Believing adversary is good or weak.
• Difficulty of changing position.
• Fundamental attribution error.
• Use of historical analogies.

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Motivated Biases

• Generate perceptions based on needs, threats, or
  interests.
• rationalizations for political interests or
  unacknowledged psychological needs and for the
  policies that serve those interests and needs.
• Wishful thinking
• Ex. WWI cult of the offensive.

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Loss Aversion, Framing, and Risk Propensity.

• People depart from expected Utility Theory.
• Ex. Prospect theory
• Decisions are made by comparing position to a
  reference point.
• People are more likely to take risks if they are
  in the domain of losses and more likely to not
  take risks in the domain of gains.

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Group Dynamics and Foreign Policy Analysis.
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Groupthink (Janis)

• Based on Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs.
• Groupthink occurs when a group becomes more
  concerned with retaining the members of the
  groups approval than coming up with good
  solutions.
• Leads to poor decision making.
• Other examples
• Pearl Harbor, Escalation in Vietnam, Iran Hostage
  Crisis.

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Results of groupthink

• Do not discuss a full range of alternatives.
• Do not look at non-obvious drawbacks.
• Neglect courses of action that were initially
  seen as unsatisfactory.
• Little attempt to consult experts.
• Only interested in facts and opinions that
  support their preferred policy.
• Little time spent on discussing what could go
  wrong.

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Thirteen Days (2000)