Terrorism, Negative Emotions and Processing the Reliability of Information in Foreign policy Decision Making.

The events of September 11, 2001 as well as more recent cases in Spain, Saudi-Arabia, and the Middle East, have shown that terrorism is no longer a phenomenon that can be ignored in the analysis of international affairs. An example of this is the electoral failure of the incumbent party in Spain and the subsequent withdrawal of their troops from Iraq following the train bombings in Madrid. Furthermore, it seems quite apparent that terrorist incidents often generate negative emotional reactions. We have argued elsewhere that negative emotions influence both the processes and outcomes of foreign policy decision-making by reducing the cognitive capacity of the decision maker and by inducing a thematic bias on the process (Geva, Redd & Mosher 2004, Redd, Mosher & Geva 2004). The focus of this study is on the effects of negative emotions on the sensitivity of decision makers to the quality of the information they use to make their choices. Specifically, an experimental procedure is utilized to explore the conditions where decision makers opt to evaluate the reliability (i.e., quality) of each piece of information pertaining to an international crisis or alternatively search for more information and ignore their reliability. Essentially, we ask, "Will the traditional tradeoff between quality and quantity of information faced by decision makers be affected by emotional biases?" The results of the experiment are discussed in terms of the effects of negative emotions on decision thresholds and choice propensity calculations within the cognitive calculus model of foreign policy decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]