Richard K. Herrmann

Mass Public Decisions on Go to War: A Cognitive-Interactionist Framework

How do Americans decide whether their country should use military force abroad? We argue they combine dispositional preferences and ideas about the geopolitical situation. This article reports the results of a representative national survey that incorporated five experiments. Findings include the following: (1) Respondent dispositions, especially isolationism versus internationalism and assertiveness versus accommodativeness, consistently constrained policy preferences, whereas liberalism-conservatism did not; (2) features of the geopolitical context—the presence of U.S. interests, relative power, the images of the adversarys motivations, and judgments about cultural status—also influenced support for military intervention; and (3) systematic interactions emerged between dispositions and geopolitical context that shed light on when and why ideological disagreements about the use of force are likely to be amplified and attenuated by situational factors. Our results are consistent with a cognitive-interactionist perspective, in which people adapt broad predispositions in relatively thoughtful ways to specific foreign policy problems.

Images in International Relations: An Experimental Test of Cognitive Schemata

We build on the tradition of studying images in international relations by developing a theory of perceived relationships and their associated images. The psychological theory is connected to a set of assumptions drawn from international relations theory that suggest perceived strategic relationships can be conceived of as a function of perceived relative power, perceived culture, and the perceived threat or perceived opportunity that a subject believes another actor represents. We hypothesize that perceived relationships evoke both cognitive and affective processes that lead to at least four ideal typical images. We further hypothesize that enemy, ally, colony, and degenerate images have identifiable and interrelated components. We test to see if the component parts of these images are related to each other, if the overall image affects the processing and interpretation of new information, and if strategic foreign policy choices follow from the cognitive and affective aspects of the image. The findings indicate that three of the four images are unified schemata, used even by inexperienced analysts. We find further that affect in combination with cognition does predict policy choice in the case of the enemy image. We suggest that image theory is a promising means by which foreign policy and international relations may be fruitfully studied.

The Empirical Challenge of the Cognitive Revolution: A Strategy for Drawing Inferences about Perceptions

This paper argues that while we have adopted the language of decisionmaking in our theories of international relations, we have not adequately addressed the operational problems of studying cognitive variables. After I identify the empirical challenge, I try to direct our theoretical attention to the task of drawing inferences about a subjects perceptions and definitions. I advance a preliminary theory and strategy that might guide this inference process, and then apply the basic method to a case study of Soviet perspectives on change in the Third World. The paper tries to bridge three domains: international relations theory, the psychology of social cognition, and Soviet area studies.

Defending International Norms: The Role of Obligation, Material Interest, and Perception in Decision Making

States defend norms in some cases but not in others. Understanding this variation sheds light on both U.S. foreign policy and the role of normative reasoning. We report the results of four experiments embedded in a survey of U.S. elites. The experiments identified the effects of felt normative obligation (that is, the logic of what is appropriate) and concern for U.S. economic and security interests (that is, the logic of utilitarian consequence) as well as the role played by individual perceptions. We find that perceptions of another actors motivation, of conflicts as civil or cross-border wars, and of the democratic nature of victims affect decisions to defend a prescriptive norm. This finding means that theories of international relations that feature norms as structural concepts need to consider actor-level cognition when examining the operation of norms. Moreover, we find that when U.S. economic and security interests are at stake there is a much greater inclination to defend norms than when simply normative obligation is present. Most U.S. elites appear to treat the presence or absence of U.S. material interests as a legitimate criterion for deciding whether or not to defend an international prescriptive norm.

How Americans Think about Trade: Reconciling Conflicts among Money, Power, and Principles

Trade has again emerged as a controversial issue in America, yet we know little about the ideas that guide American thinking on these questions. By combining traditional survey methods with experimental manipulation of problem content, this study explores the ideational landscape among elite Americans and pays particular attention to how elite Americans combine their ideas about commerce with their ideas about national security and social justice. We find that most American leaders think like intuitive neoclassical economists and that only a minority think along intuitive neorealist or Rawlsian lines. Among the mass public, in contrast, a majority make judgments like intuitive neorealists and intuitive Rawlsians. Although elite respondents see international institutions as promising vehicles in principle, in practice they favor exploiting Americas advantage in bilateral bargaining power over granting authority to the World Trade Organization. The distribution of these ideas in America is not arrayed neatly along traditional ideological divisions. To understand the ideational landscape, it is necessary to identify how distinctive mental models-mercantilist, neorealist, egalitarian, and neoclassical economic-sensitize or desensitize people to particular aspects of geopolitical problems, an approach we call cognitive interactionism.

Beliefs, Values, and Strategic Choice: U.S. Leaders’ Decisions to Engage, Contain, and Use Force in an Era of Globalization

Do ideational factors shape the strategic choices of American leaders in the realm of national security policy? If they do, what perceptions and value dispositions guide choices toward critical countries like Russia, China, Japan, and Iran? Macrotheories of international relations make assumptions about the microprocesses at the decision-making level that are rarely examined empirically. For instance, do leaders decide based on their perceptions of an adversarys intentions as neo-realists claim or do they give greater weight to their perceptions of similar and different political cultures as advocates of the democratic peace assume? If ideational factors matter at all, are they independent forces or simply determined by demographics and/or parochial interests? This project reports the results of a survey of 514 U.S. leaders designed to answer these questions. We find that military assertiveness remains related to decisions to use force as it was during the Cold War but that a new disposition—attitudes toward free trade—has emerged as an even more robust predictor of these decisions as well as decisions to engage and contain. We find support for the microfoundations of neo-realist and image theory as well as for the idea that perceived culture matters. Our study also provides individual-level evidence for a micromechanism connecting trade to pacific choices.

Analyzing Soviet Images of the United States

Interpretations of Soviet foreign policy often rest on assumptions about Soviet perceptions of the United States. This article presents a method for inferring Soviet perceptions. The effort builds on theories that are related to the analysis of perception in foreign policy decision-making and complements other empirical studies of Soviet statements. The article analyzes Soviet images at two levels: (1) media coverage of four regional conflicts, and (2) Politburo speeches. The media analysis concentrates on four cases—the Horn of Africa 1977-1978, North and South Yemen 1979, Iran 1978-1979, and Afghanistan 1979. The Politburo speeches cover the era of détente 1971-1978. The article finds that the view of the United States that prevails in Moscow resembles a well-known enemy stereotype. The enemy imagery is found to prevail at both levels and indicates a significant perception of threat, and possibly the relevance of an “inherent bad faith” model.

From prediction to learning: Opening experts' minds to unfolding history

Although it would be nice if the intelligence communitys tradecraft or the academic communitys theories could predict the future, it is essential that international security experts learn quickly and accurately from unfolding history. This article reports on a multiyear study of experts dealing with security on the Korean Peninsula. It examines how experts learn and what can derail rational updating. Three factors common to much of the work in security studies contribute to the problem: the tendency to treat the intentions of other actors as unknowable private information that is beyond empirical examination; the inclination to believe that power provides a parsimonious explanation, even though it is multifaceted and dependent on numerous components; and the penchant for engaging in factor wars over which causal factors are most important while paying little attention to the cumulative and interactive effect of multiple factors. Collectively, these three factors produce overconfidence in hindsight and leave experts prisoners to their preconceptions. The article investigates in the Korean case whether translating narrative expert beliefs systems (i.e., theories) into Bayesian networks can open minds and promote more appropriate updating, and suggests that it can.

How Attachments to the Nation Shape Beliefs About the World: A Theory of Motivated Reasoning

If competing beliefs about political events in the world stem largely from information asymmetries, then more information and knowledge should reduce the gap in competing perceptions. Empirical studies of decision making, however, often find just the reverse: as knowledge and the stakes in play go up, the beliefs about what is happening polarize rather than converge. The theory proposed here attributes this to motivated reasoning. Emotions inside the observer shape beliefs along with information coming from the outside world. A series of experiments embedded in a national survey of Americans finds that a primary driver of the beliefs someone forms about globalization, other countries, and the politics in the Middle East is how strongly they attach their social identity to the United States. Attachment produces more intense positive and negative emotions that in turn shape the interpretation of unfolding events and lead norms to be applied in an inconsistent fashion. People, in effect, rewrite reality around their favored course of action, marrying the logic of appropriateness to their own preferences. Beliefs, consequently, are not independent of preferences but related to them. Motivated reasoning, while not consistent with rational models, is predictable and can lead to expensive mistakes and double standards that undermine liberal internationalism.

The Middle East and the New World Order: Rethinking U.S. Political Strategy After the Gulf War

~ O n March 6, 1991, President Bush declared victory; the Allied coalition had defeated Iraq in the Gulf War.’ He spoke of a ”New World Order” in which the principles of justice and fair play would protect the weak from the strong and in which the United Nations, freed from the Cold War, could fulfill its historic vision. The United States would pursue a four-part strategy to secure a political victory from the military success. It would build shared security arrangements in the Gulf, reinforce its effort to control the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, foster economic development, and seize the new opportunities to find peace and security in an Arab-Israeli peace process. This postwar strategy quickly ran into the complexities of Near Eastern politics. The security arrangements, based on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) plus Egypt and Syria, drew uncertain support from the GCC as Saudi Arabia, evidently worried about its own domestic legitimacy, asked Egyptian and Syrian forces to withdraw. The United States was drawn into the Iraqi civil war in defense of the Kurds, which complicated the situation in eastern Turkey, while Saddam Hussein reconsolidated control and new U.S. intelligence estimates concluded that the damage to Iraq’s air and missile capabilities were not as extensive as immediate postwar estimates had hoped. Iran, meantime, seeing the United States as the strong state that weak countries needed protection from, moved quickly to organize an alternative security coalition with the Islamic states of Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey. China announced new plans to sell ballistic missiles to Syria and Pakistan. Nobody with resources to spend seemed interested in regional economic development schemes, and Secretary of State James Baker quickly ran into the same ArabIsraeli stalemate over the Arabs in East Jerusalem and who would represent the Palestinians that had confounded his peace efforts in 1989 and 1990. Both the Arabs and the Israelis expected the United States to use its postwar leverage to push the peace process forward but each, in return for their