G. Matthew Bonham

Cognitive Process and Foreign Policy Decision-Making

As the analysis of foreign policy decision-making has become a more theoretical enterprise, the production of historically oriented case studies has been supplemented by a growing number of investigations employing psychological or socialpsychological perspectives. Early studies of foreign policy decision-making with a psychological orientation emphasized the influence of various psychological traits on those involved in foreign policy decisions (e.g., Levinson, 1957), but, more recently, the emphasis has been on perception, cognition, and information-processing. The cognitive process approaches, by contrast, have attempted, in varying degrees, to map out the belief structures of decision makers and explore the implications of these structures for the way international events are understood and policy alternatives are considered. Studies under this rubric have focused upon the perceptions of particular foreign policy decision makers (Holsti, 1962), on the perceptions and choices of groups of persons simulating the roles of foreign policy decision makers (Driver, 1962; Hermann, 1969; Hermann and Hermann, 1967; Shapiro, forthcoming), and on the decision process of national decision groups focused upon particular policy problems (Steinbruner, forthcoming).

The October WarChanges in Cognitive Orientation, Toward the Middle East Conflict

In this paper we will examine adjustments that foreign policy officials make in their thinking to accommodate new information. In 1971–1972 and again in 1974–1975 a sample of American foreign policy officials was interviewed about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Cognitive maps constructed from the interviews were used to simulate reactions of the policy officials to the October 1973 war. A comparison of simulations based on the pre-war and the post-war maps shows that there was almost no restructuring of beliefs. The conflict reinforced the views of some officials, while it led others to perceive certain concepts as having a negative rather than a positive effect on their values.

A Discursive Practices Approach to Collective Decision-Making

Using a discursive frame of meaning, Colemans notions of the power and interests of actors in a collective decision-making process are reoriented to emphasize the power of competing understandings of a policy situation. The contribution of actors to the collective decision-making process has an impact through their association with various idea elements or discursive practices which comprise their cognitive maps. The performance of a computer simulation model of collective decision-making based on these assumptions is examined using cognitive maps and interview data collected from officials who participated in Norwegian oil policy decision-making. The simulation model produced a set of understandings that is more or less similar to the actual public debate on oil policy and a ranking of policy preferences that coincides with the actual decision to begin oil exploration in northern Norway.

A Cognitive Model of Decision-making: Application to Norwegian Oil Policy

This article attempts to increase our understanding of cognitive processes of policy- making by reporting the application of a model of individual decision-making. The application of the model is based on cognitive maps obtained from interviews which were conducted with Norwegian oil policy officials before and after the Bravo blow out in Norways Ekofisk oil field. A comparison of simulation results for two groups of policy officials, environmentalists and non-environmentalists, using the before and after cognitive maps suggests that the model is able to replicate adjustments that policy officials make in their thinking and choice behavior to accommodate perceptions of new events.

Thought and Action in Foreign Policy

The papers assembled here constitute, and to some extent represent, widely disparate views of foreign policy thinking and decision-making. As is the case with almost any collective enterprise, it is possible to suggest some noteworthy resemblances among the contributions to this volume and to indicate grounds for distinguishing them from other “approaches.” Indeed it was a belief in the distinctiveness of the work of the contributors, all of whom were invited to participate in the MSSB Conference on Cognitive Process Models of Foreign Policy Decision-Making, that stimulated the papers in the first place. In this case, what the contributors share exists at a fairly high level of abstraction. The overlap is worth denoting, but rather than straining credibility by erecting unimpeachable boundaries between this set of analysis and those of other foreign policy analysts, we shall rather suggest a way of conceptualizing problems in the analysis of foreign policy decision-making that may help the reader analyze the work in this volume as well as research that appears elsewhere.

Attribution theory and Arab images of the Gulf war

This article describes the results of an in-depth interview study of Arab elites in the wake of the Gulf war, research that only partially supports a crucial finding of research on actor-observer differences in social attribution. Although the aggregated explanations of these Arab respondents were consistent with the predictions of the theory, the attributions of Iraqs behavior by Egyptian elites, and attributions of the Coalitions behavior by Moroccan and Tunisian elites were not fully consistent with the hypothesis. These results were interpreted to suggest the importance of distinguishing, in applications of attribution theory, between complex political situations and simple social situations, the perspective of actors versus observers, and cultural differences in discursive practices.

Decision-Making in the Face of Uncertainty: Attributions of Norwegian and American Officials:

Recent research suggests that when decision-makers are confronted with uncertainty they are more likely to engage in simple-minded thinking, such as the judgmental heuristics that have been studied by attribution theorists. In this article we examine how foreign policy decision-makers in Norway and the United States struggled with the uncertainties that surrounded a series of incidents in northern Norway involving Soviet ships. The analysis of cognitive maps based on open-ended interviews with the deci sion-makers reveals that their central beliefs influenced the way they processed information and made decisions. As predicted by attribution theory, Norwegians attributed their own actions to situational constraints, but they were more inclined to explain Soviet behavior as a function of dispositional factors. The American officials, on the other hand, interpreted Norwegian behavior dispositionally, and Soviet behavior situationally. The policy implications of the attribution behavior of the decision-makers sug gest a number of policy recommendations for both countries.

FOREIGN POLICY DECISION-MAKING IN FINLAND AND AUSTRIA: THE APPLICATION OF A COGNITIVE PROCESS MODEL*

Must starvation be the price for good relations with the Soviet Union? Policy-makers in Finland had to face this question in 1947, when they decided against participating in the Marshall Plan, despite the fact that the country desperately needed economic aid. Although the Finns survived and prospered without Marshall Plan aid, relations with the Soviet Union continue to complicate the foreign policy decisions of Finland. In 1973, for example, Finnish policy-makers faced the question of whether or not to sign a free trade agreement with the enlarged European Community. Once again, the Finns were forced to consider both the economic and the political issues involved in this decision. On the one hand, the Finnish economy is highly dependent on trade, especially trade with Great Britain and other members of the European Community. The free trade agreement, by gradually eliminating tariffs on industrial goods, would help Finland to maintain its competitive position in Western Europe. On the other hand, the Finnish policy of neutrality is based on good relations with the Soviet Union, its powerful eastern neighbor.

Scandinavian Parliamentarians: Attitudes toward Political Integration

* This research was supported by a grant from the Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley. In addition, a NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship in Science enabled me to spend a year in Scandinavia as a Visiting Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Oslo. Andren, who is somewhat optimistic about Scandinavian integration, admits that the process lacks ’a central authoritative basis’, although he claims that the ’fine meshed net of small interdependencies that is being spun over the Nordic countries’ may spill over into the political sphere.6 One of the most compelling explanations for the slow pace of integration in Scandinavia stresses effects of extraregional systems.7 While developments outside of Scandinavia may push the region closer together, they more often have the opposite effect and pull the region apart. The Scandinavians, because of their involvements in extra-

Norway and Turkey: Possibilities of Cooperation through the Eyes of Turkish Opinion-Makers

The authors conducted interviews with opinion-makers in Turkey in 2012 to explore the feasibility of cooperation between Turkey and Norway on issues of peacebuilding. Norway was viewed by respondents as a country with softpower capabilities and a focus on human rights, democratic values, and the rule of law. Some opinion-makers also emphasized that both countries have a similar position on Palestine, a pivotal issue in the Middle East. Obstacles to cooperation include the geographical distance between the two countries, the lack of common institutions, Norway’s lack of experience with different ethnicities and faiths, Norway’s failure to object to the 2005-2006 Danish cartoon scandal regarding Mohammed, Norwegian criticism of Turkey’s policies toward the Kurds, and its imprisonment of dissidents without due process of law. Despite these issues, respondents expressed enthusiasm about future cooperation, and view Norway as a far better potential collaborator than any other European country, in part because it, like Turkey, is outside the EU but a member of NATO. The issue of trade-offs between Norway’s use of soft power and its economic aspirations, namely oil investments in other countries, was also explored. The article concludes with a discussion of the possibility that increased cooperation between Turkey and Norway may give rise to “Turkophobia”, an extension of “Islamophobia”, a simplistic interpretative framework that rests on cultural misunderstanding and miscommunication.