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How do cognitive biases relevant to foreign policy decision making aggregate in groups? Many tendencies identified in the behavioral decision-making literature—such as reactive devaluation, the intentionality bias, and risk seeking in the domain of losses—have been linked to hawkishness in foreign policy choices, potentially increasing the risk of conflict, but how these “hawkish biases” operate in the small-group contexts in which foreign policy decisions are often made is unknown. We field three large-scale group experiments to test how these biases aggregate in groups. We find that groups are just as susceptible as individuals to these canonical biases, with neither hierarchical nor horizontal group decision-making structures significantly attenuating the magnitude of bias. Moreover, diverse groups perform similarly to more homogeneous ones, exhibiting similar degrees of bias and marginally increased risk of dissension. These results suggest that at least with these types of biases, the “aggregation problem” may be less problematic for psychological theories in international relations than some critics have argued. This has important implications for understanding foreign policy decision making, the role of group processes, and the behavioral revolution in international relations.

The decision to engage in face-to-face diplomacy aimed at reassuring an adversary is one of the most salient ones a state leader will have to make. However, often leaders choose not to engage in such diplomacy because they follow those scholars and pundits who are skeptical of the reassurance value of interpersonal face-to-face diplomacy. This creates an important puzzle. Why do leaders sometimes choose to promote reassurance through meeting personally? And why, in other cases, do they not? The answer we provide in this article is that it depends crucially on the extent to which each leader in the dyad possesses security dilemma sensibility (SDS). We conceptualize SDS as varying both in intensity of the strength of the actor's intention and capacity to exercise it and in the extent to which actors believe the other actor in the dyad may possess SDS. The article develops a typology of three SDS leader types—distrusters, uncertains, and empathics—showing how the strength and orientation of SDS in each type shape their willingness to pursue face-to-face diplomacy. We then illustrate the utility of the typology in three short cases: Reagan and Gorbachev's decisions to engage in 1985 in Geneva, Kennedy and Khrushchev's decisions to meet in 1961 in Vienna, and finally, one of the “dogs that did not bark” (the summits that did not happen), the lack of face-to-face diplomacy between Obama and his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong-il. We conclude with implications for future research and recommendations for policymakers.

One of the central puzzles in the study of diplomacy is why some interactions between leaders result in positive social bonds, while others are mired in distrust and hostility. Recent research in the field of microsociology, the study of everyday interactions, most notably the pioneering research of American sociologist Randall Collins, suggests several critical ingredients for a successful interaction, including bodily copresence. In this article we interrogate this claim and provide theoretical reasons why textual communication may serve as a proxy for copresence in leader interactions. We demonstrate that while copresence, in the form of face-to-face interaction, is required for strong bond formation, mediated interaction in the form of letters can serve to create weak social bonds. The strength of weak bonds is in the reduction of distrust and the gradual development of trust that can be critical to the de-escalation of crises. Empirically, we explore our argument in two hard cases for social bond formation: the letters exchanged between Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the interactions, both textual and face-to-face, between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan at the end of the Cold War. We conclude by pointing toward an interdisciplinary research agenda on the determinants of social bond formation in diplomacy.

The study of microfoundations, especially individuals, is enjoying a renaissance in international relations (IR) scholarship. Yet, this rise is more difficult to find in publication data. Using the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) journal-article database, we show that only 13.7% of IR articles in 12 leading journals use the first image. This proportion remains approximately the same from 1980 through 2018. Interrogating the data, we show that this distribution does not stem from epistemological or methodological commitments, such as positivism, quantitative analysis, or formal modeling. We suggest several reasons for this apparent disjuncture between qualitative assessments of the rebirth of first-image theorizing and the quantitative data that imply a slower or perhaps more limited return.

How people interpret the intentions of others is fundamental to politics. This article examines intention understanding in the domain of how citizens evaluate wartime conduct. Drawing on recent work in moral psychology, it argues that people are more likely to attribute intentionality to wartime actions that produce morally bad consequences than otherwise identical actions that produce morally good consequences. We test this theory with two vignette-based survey experiments. Our results show that this hypothesis holds in a variety of contexts relating to civilian casualties and the destruction of heritage sites during war. By unlocking the moral psychology of intention understanding, this article contributes to the field of political psychology in general, and more specifically to theoretical debates in International Relations (IR) about public opinion on just war doctrine.

The use of negative visual imagery of the poor to conjure feelings of pity, guilt, and empathy (also called “poverty porn”) is premised on an emotional mechanism that is supposed to elicit compassion and giving behavior, and yet the very emotional nature of the response to this kind of negative imagery can have the exact opposite effect by evoking compassion fatigue and psychological numbing. Our study interrogates this puzzle. Leveraging original data from survey experiments, we show that exposure to negative and personalized images of aid recipients in despair actually increases support for foreign development aid. In contrast, descriptive statistical information about global poverty moves people very little, or not at all. Our findings have implications for understanding the role imagery plays in shaping public opinion on foreign aid and for development communication. This study builds a bridge between research on foreign aid and humanitarian communication.

Bringing together psychological approaches to empathy with research on public preferences for foreign development aid, we shed light on the role empathy plays in global helping behavior. We argue individuals combine their affective empathic responses with situational factors when forming foreign aid preferences. Testing our theory with two novel experiments embedded in a national survey of US citizens, we find that affective empathy not only predicts the individual variation in foreign aid preferences but also explains why Americans weigh aid effectiveness and recipient deservingness—the two important situational aspects of foreign aid—differently. We show that the ability to feel others’ pain is what facilitates global helping behavior, not simply knowing their pain. However, even though this affective ability moderates the impact of aid effectiveness, it amplifies that of recipient merit. Our results contribute to a richer understanding of when empathy facilitates public support for foreign development aid and add to the burgeoning research program on behavioral international politics.

It is widely recognized among state leaders and diplomats that personal relations play an important role in international politics. Recent work at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and sociology has highlighted the critical importance of face-to-face interactions in generating intention understanding and building trust. Yet, a key question remains as to why some leaders are able to ‘hit it off,’ generating a positive social bond, while other interactions ‘fall flat,’ or worse, are mired in negativity. To answer, we turn to micro-sociology – the study of everyday human interactions at the smallest scales – an approach that has theorized this question in other domains. Drawing directly from US sociologist Randall Collins, and related empirical studies on the determinants of social bonding, we develop a model of diplomatic social bonding that privileges interaction elements rather than the dispositional characteristics of the actors involved or the material environment in which the interaction takes place. We conclude with a discussion of how the study of interpersonal dyadic bonding interaction may move forward.

The discipline of international relations (ir) is not known for the prominence given to diplomatic history. Yet, recent trends in behavioral science have resulted in the emergence of a renewed focus on diplomacy in ir, in particular with regard to the emotions and psychology of international actors.

Measuring compliance with international norms is usually taken to be a relatively straightforward exercise. To determine whether a state is compliant, scholars typically measure the level of conformity between their behavior and “the letter of the law.” IR theorists often disagree over whether compliance tells us anything meaningful about the causal effects of international norms, but most believe that it can at least be measured. We argue that, for certain norms and laws, this claim is too optimistic. We draw on recent insights from moral philosophy and moral psychology to distinguish between two types of international norms: (1) proscriptive norms that govern state practices by providing fairly specific rules of appropriateness for how states or other actors are expected to behave and (2) calculative norms, which do not stipulate any particular rules of appropriateness, but rather require that states take efforts to maximize or minimize a specific value. The laws of war, for example, hold that states cannot target civilians (proscriptive), but they do allow for tactics that generate collateral damage, as long as it is minimized (calculative). Because assessments of conformity between state practices and calculative norms require evaluation of intentions—which can be difficult at best to obtain, particularly in instances where actors have incentives to mislead or dissemble—measuring compliance by assessing behavior and its consequences can be very misleading and lead to false negatives. Using US bombing policy in Vietnam as an illustrative case, we show that failing to observe the differences between norm types can lead to confusion when evaluating the effects of international law.

Objective To evaluate the associations between real-time overall patient satisfaction and Emergency Department (ED) crowding as determined by patient percepton and crowding estimation tool score in a high-volume ED. Design A prospective observational study. Setting A tertiary acute hospital ED and a Level 1 trauma center. Participants ED patients. Intervention(s) Crowding status was measured by two crowding tools [National Emergency Department Overcrowding Scale (NEDOCS) and Severely overcrowded-Overcrowded-Not overcrowded Estimation Tool (SONET)] and patient perception of crowding surveys administered at discharge. Main outcome measure(s) ED crowding and patient real-time satisfaction. Results From 29 November 2015 through 11 January 2016, we enrolled 1345 participants. We observed considerable agreement between the NEDOCS and SONET assessment of ED crowding (bias = 0.22; 95% limits of agreement (LOAs): -1.67, 2.12). However, agreement was more variable between patient perceptions of ED crowding with NEDOCS (bias = 0.62; 95% LOA: -5.85, 7.09) and SONET (bias = 0.40; 95% LOA: -5.81, 6.61). Compared to not overcrowded, there were overall inverse associations between ED overcrowding and patient satisfaction (Patient perception OR = 0.49, 95% confidence limit (CL): 0.38, 0.63; NEDOCS OR = 0.78, 95% CL: 0.65, 0.95; SONET OR = 0.82, 95% CL: 0.69, 0.98). Conclusions While heterogeneity exists in the degree of agreement between objective and patient perceived assessments of ED crowding, in our study we observed that higher degrees of ED crowding at admission might be associated with lower real-time patient satisfaction.

Digital diplomacy has no shortage of synonyms or terminology debates (digital diplomacy has been variously referred to, or described, as “e-Diplomacy,” “cyber Diplomacy,” “net diplomacy,” “#diplomacy,” “diplomacy 2.0,” “public diplomacy 2.0,” “networked diplomacy,” “real-time diplomacy,” “21st-century statecraft,” “diplomacy in the digital age,” “digitalization of diplomacy,” or “digidiplomacy”), yet each term shares a common perspective: the use of digital information communication technologies, such as the Internet, to achieve diplomatic objectives. While foreign ministries have used newly available technologies throughout their history for various purposes—including cable wire, radio transmissions, telephone, television, video conferencing, among others—the advent of the Internet ushered in an explosion both in the use of digital technologies in diplomacy and in scholarly interest in how those technologies may be changing the role of diplomacy in world politics (see Oxford Bibliographies article in International Relations “History of Diplomacy”). Digital diplomacy scholarship has developed through two fairly distinct phases, with different emphases and from two different, and distinct, vantage points. Early work in digital diplomacy attempted to answer broad theoretical questions about the activity itself: What is digital diplomacy? How is it different than traditional diplomacy (see Oxford Bibliographies article in International Relations “Face-to-Face Diplomacy”)? How does digital diplomacy affect traditional diplomacy, if at all? Subsequently, scholars have built upon these theoretical perspectives and asked specific methodological questions and interrogated critical issues of measuring causal effects: How can scholars empirically demonstrate the effect of digital diplomacy? What is the baseline upon which we can judge “successful” or “unsuccessful” digital diplomacy initiatives? What are the practical policy implications, and recommendations, that follow from these empirical perspectives? These two phases of development—theorization and measurement—have developed contemporaneously with two distinct substantive perspectives on the focus of digital diplomacy initiatives: projection and retrieval. Digital diplomacy projection refers to the ways in which states use information communication technologies to transmit information to statespersons, diplomats, or, as in the case of public diplomacy, foreign publics. Digital diplomacy retrieval refers to the ways in which states use these same technologies to gather information from these same actors, such as in the overlap between diplomacy and intelligence gathering. Some digital diplomacy endeavors accomplish both. The future of digital diplomacy study likely involves more refining of theoretical propositions regarding projection and retrieval, as well as development of more sophisticated, and precise, methodological tools to help study projection and retrieval empirically.

A common assumption in international relations (IR) theory is that threat perception involves the very deliberate and painstaking task of processing information. Costly signals, movements toward rapprochement, conciliatory gestures, speech acts, intentioned behavior, and other actions are interpreted and consciously analyzed in order to answer the simple question: Does the relevant actor pose a threat? Yet, a wealth of evidence from psychology and neuroscience suggests that rather than consciously evaluating others, we tend to make quick judgments within milliseconds of meeting. First impressions, it turns out, are critical to judgments of threat as well as trustworthiness. And crucially, first impressions are sticky in that they last long into a relationship and color future interactions. This article elaborates this cognitive bias in IR threat perception, posits a theory of first impressions at the individual level of analysis, and outlines its importance in diplomacy. In particular, I connect the literature on first impressions to the problem of first encounters in constructivist theorizing, suggest links to the proliferation of symbolic violence, and find an antidote to symbolic violence in the practice of digital diplomacy.

Brian C. Rathbun. (2014). Diplomacy’s Value: Creating Security in 1920s Europe and the Contemporary Middle East . Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 267 pp., $29.95 paperback (ISBN: 978-0-8014-7990-8). Almost twenty years ago, Paul Sharp (1999, 34) made the following observation in this very journal: “… we might think that students of international relations would pay a great deal of attention to diplomacy, but they do not. The study of diplomacy remains marginal to and almost disconnected from the field.” Close to two decades later, the study of diplomacy, firmly planted within the discipline of international relations, is in much healthier shape. Sharp’s own (2009) Diplomatic Theory of International Relations , Christer Jonsson and Martin Hall’s (2005) Essence of Diplomacy , Jennifer Mitzen’s (2013) Power in Concert: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Global Governance , Keren Yarhi-Milo’s (2014) Knowing the Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence, and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations , and Rebecca Adler-Nissen’s (2014) Opting Out of the European Union: Diplomacy, Sovereignty, and European Integration are all exemplary attempts to not only refocus attention onto diplomacy as a discrete activity of international practice that deserves attention, but to theorize at a deep level how diplomats contribute to the construction of the international system. Brian C. Rathbun’s (2014) Diplomacy’s Value: Creating Security in 1920s Europe and the Contemporary Middle East not only contributes to this resurgence of interest in diplomacy, but propels the discussion forward in three important ways, including theoretically, empirically, and methodologically. Before discussing the value of the argument, … mholmes{at}wm.edu

Diplomatic Afterlives. Edited by Andrew F Cooper. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015. 206 pp., $24.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6199-5). The academic study of diplomacy in the discipline of International Relations (IR) has flourished in recent years (see Sending, Pouliot, and Neumann ⇓; Pouliot and Cornut ⇓ for recent volumes that include substantive reviews of the recent diplomacy renaissance). After decades of discounting diplomacy's importance in favor of structural explanations (Rathbun ⇓:1), diplomacy has (re)-emerged on the landscape of mainstream IR theorizing. One reason for this is the growing recognition that states spend so much time engaging in diplomacy, it must be for a good reason (if we assume that states take purposeful actions). More important is the growing sense that structural features beyond the control of individuals, such as power, do not account for the tremendous variation we see in political outcomes in the international system. In order to make sense of this variation, we need a theory of agency, an understanding of how individual agents can affect outcomes independent of other structural factors. Several works in the last few years have attempted to construct theories of diplomacy as theories of agency. Rathbun's (⇓) Diplomacy's Value: Creating Security in 1920s Europe and the Contemporary Middle East is an exemplar. Rathbun sets out discrete propositions about how diplomatic styles and diplomat characteristics, particularly prosocial vs. proself orientations, combine to help explain the Locarno period in Europe. Yarhi-Milo's (⇓) Knowing the Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence, and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations demonstrates that policymakers often make decisions about the intentions of states not just by looking at structural factors, but instead by relying on preexisting beliefs and …

The use of neuroscience in political science inquiry has steadily increased over the last decade, yet many remain skeptical regarding its usefulness in explaining outcomes and solving puzzles. In this article we develop ramifications of the neuroscientific paradigm of the ‘social brain’ and critically assess its utility for political science. We argue that this model has promise in three distinct areas of research: challenging assumptions, clarifying conceptions, and specifying conditions. We then apply this theoretical framework to a specific puzzle in political science that transcends sub-field distinctions: social norm compliance. We argue that utilizing the social brain paradigm allows us to clarify precisely what social norms are at a physical level, challenge the underlying assumptions of current social norm research, and specify precise and testable conditions of compliance and non-compliance behavior. Ultimately we suggest that the social brain specifically and neuroscience generally offer much promise for political scientists, although scholars must be critical and careful in their justification and application of neuroscientific data.

Face-to-face diplomacy has long been the lynchpin of international politics, yet it has largely been dismissed as irrelevant in theories of cooperation and conflict—as “cheap talk” because leaders have incentives to dissemble. However, diplomats and leaders have argued for years that there is often no substitute for personally meeting a counterpart to hash out an agreement. This article argues that face-to-face diplomacy provides a signaling mechanism that increases the likelihood of cooperation. Face-to-face meetings allow individuals to transmit information and empathize with each other, thereby reducing uncertainty, even when they have strong incentives to distrust the other. The human brain has discrete architecture and processes devoted to parsing others' intentions via cues in face-to-face interaction. These processes enable actors to directly access the intentions of others with a higher degree of certainty than economic and game-theoretic models of bargaining predict.

Social neuroscience has seen a profound rise in other social science disciplines, such as economics, yet there has been relatively little systematic analysis of the usefulness of social neuroscience for international relations and the study of world politics. This article suggests that while there are many potential explanations for why this might be the case, one important barrier to adopting neuroscience may be our metaphysical assumptions and philosophical wagers. I suggest that if all politics is rooted in the brain, then two distinct arguments regarding agent-structure are plausible. One argument suggests that structure becomes redundant once the brain is accounted for; the other suggests that the brain simply drops out as epiphenomenal. After all, if all politics is reflected in the brain, then the brain itself is less interesting than the structure being reflected. These wagers ultimately relate to positions we take on the mind–body problem and well-known ideational-material divide. New research in neuroscience and philosophy of mind suggests that this binary distinction can be overcome, suggesting a new “via media” between ideas and material that may offer significant promise for both theory and practice.

Software development is hard enough for specialist software companies to get right. For people outside the industry it can be a minefield full of hidden surprises. This articles hopes to explain why software development is so hard, how to go about approaching a software development project, and how to get the best out of any collaboration with a development team. It should be read by anyone who is considering developing a software product, including websites, from a non-development.

Scholars of transportation and homeland security have begun to assess the relative costs and benefits of specific national security programs. Two programs that have generated significant attention in both popular media and scholarly literature are the Department of Homeland Security’s “Future Attribute Screening Technology” (FAST) and Transportation Security Administration’s “Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques” (SPOT). Both of these programs utilize behavioral detection techniques to assess risk by reading the intentions of individuals. This article makes two contributions to this debate. First, it delineates the various strategies of behavioral detection that are often conflated and presents a structure of approaches, reviewing the respective literatures on each to understand the effectiveness and drawbacks of each strategy. Second, to the extent that we have sufficient knowledge about each strategy in the public realm, the article assesses the benefits, both current and potential, of each of the strategies and provides a general sense of the value of behavioral detection.

This article explores the efforts of diaspora groups to reinvigorate culture. Cultural policy studies tend to focus on efforts of the state to fund and support the maintenance, enhancement, and preservation of national culture(s). This article contributes to this area of research by noting the effects of diaspora groups in achieving many of the same ends as official cultural policy through unofficial means. Using Ukraine as an interpretive case study, the article explores diasporic efforts to respond to a lack of cultural policy at home by invigorating Ukrainian culture abroad. Through the use of social networking tools, Ukrainian diaspora groups in the United States and Canada have been successful in maintaining their culture without the state. This study suggests that cultural policy research should involve not only official state-centric efforts, but nonofficial diaspora-centric efforts of cultural invigoration.

International Relations (IR) theorists have traditionally viewed rationality and consciousness as defining features of human behavior. But recently this approach has come under fire from several angles. Not only do many psychologists now consider rationality to be dependent on emotions, recent developments in the logics of action debate in IR theory explicitly argue for de-emphasizing the role of consciousness and rationality in theorizing agency. In an effort to put rationality back into its proper place, we critique two recent contributions to the logics of action debate: practice theory and the logic of habit. Both logics of action are useful in many respects, but we argue that they rest on a view of individual agency that is too structural and insufficiently cognitive to fully understand how individuals make decisions in international politics. We do not doubt that unconscious reflexes often control individual decisions, but we maintain that cognitive control and deliberation play a much larger role in constructing these reflexes than practice theory and the logic of habit recognize. We sketch a rational intuitionist logic of action for IR theory. We argue that intuitions constitute the most useful way to theorize the unconscious determinants of individual action and that although intuitions control how people behave in particular circumstances, they are subject to rational recalibration through internal and intersubjective reasoning.

Rationalist models of decision making typically follow the general form of desire + belief = action. But determining an actor's beliefs and desires often proves challenging. One set of theories turns to psychology—and in particular emotions—to uncover how emotions help to shape and strengthen beliefs. Some of this work establishes a fit between emotions and the rationalist paradigm. It holds that emotions account for more than irrational behaviors; they also serve as a source of rational belief. Feeling, it claims, is believing. I argue that if actors belive in the reasonability of their feelings, then this move is warranted. But a range of behavior defies this logic. Instead, I suggest that actors often find themselves torn between contradictory affective intuitions, on the one hand, and rational beliefs, on the other. In consequence, they hold rational beliefs, but their resulting behavior qualifies as irrational. I apply existing work on the distinction between belief and alief to make sense of this phenomenon. I illustrate my claims through a rereading of the security dilemma—where irrational intuitions, in conjunction with rational beliefs, fuel conflict.

Why do some peace summits succeed while others fail? We offer an explanation that highlights the importance of empathy between leaders. Studies in negotiations and psychology show that empathy—the ability to take the perspective of others and understand their cognitive and affective states without necessarily sympathizing with them—is critical in overcoming biases, transcending long-held enmities, and increasing the likelihood of cooperation. We show that empathy is perceptual in nature. Actors can convey it through both words and expressive behaviors in face-to-face interactions. From these, leaders gain an understanding of whether the other side is willing to negotiate in good faith and what a potential agreement might look like. Additionally, we argue that all is not lost if the leaders of warring states prove unable to cultivate these beliefs about each other. A skilled mediator can step in and build relational empathy between disputants. We assess the empirical ramifications of conveyed and relational empathy by comparing two of the most salient Middle East peace process summits with divergent outcomes: success at Camp David 1978 and failure in 2000.