William A. Boettcher

Echoes of Vietnam

In the early stages of the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, military leaders resisted the release of body count and “casualty ratio” data. However, in the spring of 2004, the U.S. military (and American media) began to focus on the “limited” American casualties in specific operations versus the “significant” number of insurgents killed. This article examines the extent to which body count/casualty ratio “frames” and individual casualty tolerance influence public perceptions about the war and the success or failure of U.S. military operations. Two experiments were conducted pitting alternative casualty frames against one another to measure their relative impact. The results demonstrate the influence of framing effects on public perceptions and clarify understanding of the determinants and impact of casualty tolerance.

Context, Methods, Numbers, And Words

In this article, recent attempts to apply prospect theory to the study of international relations are reviewed and evaluated. The review of this literature leads to a number of theoretical and methodological critiques that are highlighted by an experiment that demonstrates the difficulties inherent in attempting to transport this theory across disciplinary boundaries. Of special importance is the introduction of verbal probability expressions into the experimental design. The results of the experiment provide some support for prospect theory, but differences in the results obtained for different verbal probability sets indicate that decision theorists need to be more concerned with the manner in which probabilistic information is conveyed to (and discussed by) decision makers.

“Don’t Let Them Die in Vain” Casualty Frames and Public Tolerance for Escalating Commitment in Iraq

This article builds on past framing research to probe the impact of casualty frames on the public’s willingness to expend additional “blood and treasure” in an ongoing war. The rhetoric of “sunk costs” (often described as “sacrifices”) that must be redeemed through further conflict is a well-known, yet irrational, trope. Utilizing an experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey on attitudes about Iraq, we find that “investment frames” increase support for the war among individuals who believe the U.S. “did the right thing in Iraq,” but decrease support for the war among those who feel the U.S. “should have stayed out.” We also find, however, that framing effects are inconsistent when the frames are attributed to sources. These latter results demonstrate the importance of including unattributed frames to evaluate source effects in framing research.

Military Intervention Decisions Regarding Humanitarian Crises Framing Induced Risk Behavior

Factors that may affect public support or opposition to U.S. military intervention in humanitarian crises around the world are examined to determine the impact of foreign policy frames on individual risk propensity. The source of the foreign policy frames, type of humanitarian crisis, location of the crisis and race/ethnicity/religion of the endangered population, tolerable ratios of U.S. lives saved/lost to foreign citizens saved/lost, and probability of casualty-free success are also investigated.

Differences in trust between human and automated decision aids

Humans can easily find themselves in high cost situations where they must choose between suggestions made by an automated decision aid and a conflicting human decision aid. Previous research indicates that humans often rely on automation or other humans, but not both simultaneously. Expanding on previous work conducted by Lyons and Stokes (2012), the current experiment measures how trust in automated or human decision aids differs along with perceived risk and workload. The simulated task required 126 participants to choose the safest route for a military convoy; they were presented with conflicting information from an automated tool and a human. Results demonstrated that as workload increased, trust in automation decreased. As the perceived risk increased, trust in the human decision aid increased. Individual differences in dispositional trust correlated with an increased trust in both decision aids. These findings can be used to inform training programs for operators who may receive information from human and automated sources. Examples of this context include: air traffic control, aviation, and signals intelligence.

Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics

Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics. By Dominic D. P. Johnson and Dominic Tierney. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 345p.

Clarification, Critique, Framework Construction, and Research Concerns

35.00. One inevitable result of the recent U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq has been renewed scholarly interest in the determinants of wartime public opinion. In a recent influential article, Christopher Gelpi, Peter Feaver, and Jason Reifler (“Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq,” International Security 30 [Winter 2005/6]: 7–46) argue that casualty tolerance is primarily shaped by prospective beliefs about likely success and retrospective judgments regarding the “rightness” of the decision to initiate the conflict. This rationalist account of wartime public opinion suggests that the mass public will accept the costs of war if they are exceeded by attainable and important benefits.

Truman Case Studies

The study of how human beings make decisions has evolved in the last century, as the classical expected-utility (EU) model (developed by D. Bernoulli, 1967 [1738]) was refined by von Neumann and Morgenstern (1947) and then modified by Savage (1954). Savage’s model of subjective expected-utility (SEU) has since served as the primary theory guiding research on decision making in the social sciences. While the normative strength of EU and SEU is often accepted, the descriptive accuracy of the Bernoullian family of theories has been seriously questioned. The failure of SEU to explain the behavior of significant numbers of experimental subjects and real world decision makers has led to further revisions and the development of generalized EU theories that have the ability to explain some (if not all) of these anomalies. All of these theories attempt to explain, at least in part, decisions under risk—where outcomes are not certain, but the chances of the outcomes occurring follow a known probability distribution. Recently, skepticism regarding the descriptive accuracy of EU and SEU has crossed disciplinary boundaries from psychology and economics to political science, sociology, and business. In particular, researchers in political science studying foreign policy decision making have begun to examine alternatives to the Bernoullian models.

Kennedy Case Studies

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union began during the Truman administration. The World War II alliance, cobbled together by the personal diplomacy of Franklin Roosevelt, fell apart as the victors squabbled over the postwar settlement. The tensions that emerged between Truman and Stalin during the Potsdam conference would result in disagreements over the composition of governments in almost every liberated area. The threat that held the allies together during the war was replaced by the perceived opportunity to reshape the world in one’s own image and secure access to economic resources and global markets. The decisions made by the Truman administration between 1945 and 1951 would shape U.S. foreign policy for the next 45 years.

The Prospects for Prospect Theory: An Empirical Evaluation of International Relations Applications of Framing and Loss Aversion

In Laos,Vietnam, and the Congo, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy dealt with the legacy of President Dwight David Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. In each of these cases, previous U.S. commitments forced the new president to consider his response to “Communist aggression” early in his term. Particularly in Laos and Vietnam, Kennedy and his advisers were confronted with deteriorating situations that required immediate attention. Over time, President Kennedy considered various levels of military intervention by U.S. forces in these regions. Kennedy’s decision making during these cases is well documented, providing an excellent opportunity for evaluating the hypotheses that compose the Risk Explanation Framework (REF).