Political Psychology And Biopolitics

Assessing And Predicting Elite Behavior In Foreign Policy Crises

Gerald W. Hopple

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367283520
• eBook ISBN: 9781000307306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The interface between psychology and politics has been an area of sustained inquiry for several decades. More recently, the nexus between psychopolitical factors and international politics--linkages among biopolitics, political psychology, elite analysis, foreign affairs, and world politics--has been explored. This volume reviews and assesses the m

1
Introduction

The psychological foundations of foreign policy behavior constitute a fascinating area of inquiry for the student of international relations. In recent years, concepts, methods, and techniques from both cognitive psychology and psychophysiology have been transferred to the study of the behavior, belief systems, and decision-making processes of foreign policy elites. These approaches have complemented and--to a considerable extent--supplanted the more "traditional" psychopolitical perspectives drawn from psychobiography and personality theory.

Diversity and electicism characterize the conceptual and methodological armamentarium of the political psychologist who analyzes international politics. No dominant paradigm governs psychological research on foreign policy elites. While certain recurring themes can be identified and some evidence can be adduced to support the viewpoint that we can discern at least some descriptive consensus about the foreign policy decision process, there is a paucity of theoretical consensus about why the process looks as it does (Kinder and Weiss, 1978: 728). The ongoing research tends to occur within the parameters of fairly circumscribed and impermeable nuclei or research programs (operational code profiling, cognitive mapping, etc.). When the more recent work in psychophysiology is taken into account, the diversity and lack of integration become even more striking.

Research in this area requires a series of maps. In striking contrast to the prevailing mode of inquiry in basic social scientific research, where researchers construct frameworks and models, the emphasis here is on the concept of maps. What we require are heuristic and practicable guides to research and analysis rather than abstract schema or frameworks. Furthermore, these maps should be viewed as holistic images which ignore the artificial boundaries associated by convention with particular disciplines and research methodologies. Biology, psychophysiology, psychology, social psychology, anthropology, political science, and various subfields of these disciplines are among the sources of indicator systems, propositional networks, and theoretical perspectives for analyzing foreign policy-makers' belief systems and decision processes. Extensive research has accrued on the various subjects pertinent to a research program revolving around the core concepts of political psychology and psychophysiology. As is customary in social scientific inquiry, however, the existing work is disparate, uneven, and often ad hoc in nature. Pew efforts have been undertaken to map out the terrain in more than a cursory fashion. The research is especially sparse in the psychophysiology region of the map, although there is a plethora of indicators and techniques. In the interstices between politics and psychology, the relevant literature has experienced a quantitatively impressive expansion in recent years; the proliferation of frameworks for analysis, propositional inventories, and literature reviews all illustrate the fertility of psychopolitical research. Even here, however, ad hoc and non-quantitative research products prevail.

Psychological and psychophysiological/biopolitical variable areas both restrict the focus of attention to the individual. Hermann (1977) presents research on a variety of prominent "personal characteristics" of elite decision-makers in a number of substantive policy areas; Falkowski (1979a, 1979b) provides foreign policy-relevant examples. As Hermann (1977) notes in the introduction to her collection of empirical studies, subsumed under the construct of personal characteristics are all aspects of the individual as an individual:

• Biographical statistics;
• Capabilities and skills;
• Training;
• Work experiences;
• Motives;
• Cognitions;
• Affectual orientations;
• Beliefs and attitudes;
• Role perceptions;
• Values.

Since major foreign policy decisions are generally the product of individuals and/or small groups, the small group subfield of social psychology is an obvious potential component of a political psychology research design.¹ The work of Janis (1972) on groupthink is the best known of the various studies of foreign policy-making and group dynamics. Research concerning the impact of small group, organizational context, bureaucratic politics, and other social psychological dimensions of the foreign policy process is not systematically reviewed in this study. The focus here is the apex of the foreign policy elite (the head of state and, in some cases, the foreign minister) in situations which minimize the potential impact of large, institutionalized decision units. Decision contexts characterized by high levels of threat, stress, and tension—international crisis, conflict, and force situations—are the central concern of this study.²

Given a focus on the high level decision-maker, several questions immediately arise.³ Are psychological factors (broadly defined to include cognitive verbal and psychophysiological indicators) relevant to the task of explaining foreign behavior? How important are such variables vis-a-vis other potential determinants from different levels of analysis? How adequately do individual-level forces or elite attributes account for the external behavior of nations?

Scientific explanations of foreign behavior have featured discrete determinants and clusters of factors from various levels of analysis, ranging from the individual and the small group to the societal, external, and systemic levels. Critics of psychological approaches to the study of foreign policy often maintain that non-individual levels of analysis account for an overwhelming portion of the variance in external behavior and that individual-level determinants explain little or none of the behavior.

In the past, this question has frequently been treated in a very cursory, nonempirical fashion, with the critic simply assuming the irrelevance of elite belief systems and other psychological factors. More recently, empirical evidence has been produced which suggests quite clearly that the characteristics of foreign policy-makers impact upon external behavior--especially in certain types of countries and/or situations. This evidence will be reviewed in some detail in Chapters 3 and 5.

In the context of the kaleidoscopic character of recent and current inquiry on foreign policy and psychology, the more relevant issue concerns the differential impact of various types of psychological variables. Even if the focus is limited to belief systems, the problem persists; the latter construct refers to a variety of low- and high-level beliefs and attitudes, ranging in generality from very discrete perceptives of and beliefs about a voluminous number of phenomena (actors, issues, etc.) to a smaller number of central beliefs to an even smaller set of basic "master beliefs" or values.

Assuming that psychological variables are not without significance as determinants of the actions of states in the sphere of foreign policy, the relative impact of such variables emerges as a critical question. Here the evidence is less extensive, although the available work does support the tentative conclusion that psychological factors perform fairly well when compared to determinants from other levels of analysis.

In a very fundamental sense, however, the issue is not the relative effect of variable clusters but the operative causal configurations. This suggests that the focus should shift from ranking sets of factors--a pre-theoretical undertaking which is chronicled in Chapters 4 and 5--to the construction, testing, and refinement of causal models.⁴ This should be regarded as a dynamic, iterative process in which a series of first-generation models provides the foundation for more sophisticated second and third-generations.

The third basic question--the strength of the linkage between psychological variables and foreign behavior--is one which requires further exploration. The available research indicates unambiguously that the personal characteristics of foreign policy elites are related strongly to external behavior, especially for certain types of international actors and in certain situational contexts. When such mediating variable clusters are taken into account, the nexus is often quite robust in magnitude for the relevant subsets of leaders and nations.

Aside from the potency of the belief-behavior nexus per se, two other considerations favor an emphasis on the beliefs and other characteristics of elites. One stems from a concern with policy-relevance; unlike systemic parameters and many other factors, the preferences, perceptions, and choices of elites are susceptible to direct and immediate modification.⁵ Such modification can apply to the belief systems of incumbent elites or, as is more frequently the case, a new set of elites and therefore a new belief system can replace the incumbent policy-makers.

The second consideration is associated with the proximity of elite decision-makers to the dependent variable of foreign behavior. In the causal chain which culminates with verbal and physical behavior toward other actors in the interstate arena, the policy-maker--and his or her perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and values--intervenes between the more remote determinants of foreign behavior and the actual outputs. Not surprisingly, most foreign policy decision-making models equate behavior in the realm of foreign affairs with the actions and decisions of the individuals who are directly responsible for formulating foreign policy: the head of state, the foreign minister, and perhaps a small group of officials and advisors. Environmental factors influence state decisions indirectly; the impact is always mediated by the individual decision-maker or the decision-making unit.⁶

To an extent, of course, this statement is true by definition; in a very trivial and tautological sense, the perceptions and beliefs of decision-makers must intervene between the environment and the decision. Nor does the posited sequence preclude instances of "environmental determinism," when decision-maker perceptions and the decision are both shaped by environmental forces.

However, there are numerous occasions when there are discrepancies between the objective and the psychological environments. These are manifested most graphically when competing actors (individual states or coalitions) perceive strikingly different versions of reality (e.g, Arab versus Israeli decision-makers, the Axis partners versus the Anglo-French alliance in 1938-1939, etc.). This phenomenon is also illustrated by changes within systems; elites may experience cognitive reorganizations because of unusual events, such as the attack on Pearl Harbor for U.S. policy-makers (see Ben-Zvi, 1978), or the elite itself may be replaced, as in Japan in October of 1940 (when General Tojo became Premier and Minister of War) and in Britain in May of 1940 (when Churchill replaced Chamberlain).⁷ In all of these cases, at least two orthogonal psychological environments coexisted with a single objective environment.⁸

In unstructured, unprecedented situations, the latitude for elite belief systems is theoretically at its maximum. If the levels of stress, tension, and danger are simultaneously high, perceptual factors became even more influential. Thus, in situations of crisis, severe conflict, force, and war, the characteristics of elites can be expected to be especially influential as determinants of decisions.

Purely environmental models can produce very respectable results even in contexts saturated by stress and tension. However, explanations which exclude the psychological environment can only narrow the range of alternative choices; such models can never identify a particular decision if the degree of situational ambiguity is high. For nonroutine, high threat decision contexts (i.e., crisis and potential force or war decisions), it is necessary to engage in "microanalysis" of elite beliefs and perceptions if the goal is to explain or predict a specific choice.

This distinction is analogous to the one between the sources and processes of a decision. Source analysis, exemplified by the frameworks of Rosenau (1966) and Andriole et al. (1975), attempts to identify the environmental and other sources of external behavior; empirical research in the source tradition attempts to illuminate (and perhaps rank) the causal determinants of a phenomenon. In contrast, process analysis, illustrated by the various decision-making frameworks (e.g., Brecher, 1977; Caldwell, 1977; Snyder et al., 1962), involves the tracing in detail of the processes which precede a decision.⁹ Perception and definition of the situation, information processing, and the identification, evaluation, and selection of options (and the subcomponents of these elements of decision-making) comprise the core of process analysis. Psychological variables, which may or may not be introduced into a source analysis design, are absolutely essential to the process or decision-making analytical mode.

The process perspective can be contrasted with a less ambitious form of psychological analysis of foreign policy elites: the charting or empirical profiling of observable traits or states of decision -makers. As Hermann (1979a) notes in her essay on indicators of stress in policy-makers, foreign policy elites leave many traces of their behavior in the form of verbal and nonverbal indicators; the latter are discussed in Chapter 2 and the former in Chapter 3.

By restricting the focus to such verbal and nonverbal traces (i.e., to the end-products of elaborate decision processes), the observer is not constrained by the demanding requirements for data and interpretation which are imposed by the process approach. Comparative analysis (within and across decision systems) is facilitated because of the data collection task; process tracing requires extensive and elusive data on the sequences which lead up to the verbal output (e.g., a speech) or the nonverbal or psychophysiological indicator (e.g., voice stress or paralinguistic data). Such data are difficult to secure and would be prohibitively expensive in a single study of many systems.

However, the trace approach "black boxes" the internal dynamics and processes which precede and shape the observable output. In the absence of genuine process analysis, the nexus between the trace measures and the processes of perception and thought which preceded them is simply assumed. This leads to the potential danger that a verbal or nonverbal indicator will be misinterpreted or will be mistakenly treated as an index of an elaborate decision process.

Process data are certainly less accessible and more "expensive" to collect than trace data. The problem is compounded by the fact that decision-making is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. Eventually, there will probably be theories for each of the subcomponents of the process rather than a general, inclusive theory of decision-making and choice. In the interim, it is critical that basic research be conducted on the processes of decision-making as well as on the overt manifestations of actual decisions.

Even if it is conceded that characteristics of foreign policy elites are significant determinants of foreign behavior, the formidable task of securing valid, reliable data must be confronted. Data-creation methodologies have been prolific; observation, questionnaires, interviews, simulation, and biographic statistics are among the most prominent methods for generating data about the decision processes and belief systems of foreign policy elites.

Observation, questionnaires, and interviews are frequently precluded, however. While data on age, education, and other elite attributes are relatively available and some evidence points to the impact of such traits on both attitudes and behaviors (e.g., Quandt, 1970), the use of biographical statistics seems to be more appropriate for explaining generalized phenomena (e.g., relationships between ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright Acknowledgments
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 THE BIOPOLITICAL FOUNDATIONS OF ELITE FOREIGN POLICY BEHAVIOR
• 3 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF ELITE FOREIGN POLICY BEHAVIOR
• 4 ELITE VALUES AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS: AN OVERVIEW
• 5 ELITE VALUES AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS: AN EMPIRICAL TEST
• 6 IN SEARCH OF THE FOUNDATIONS OF ELITE FOREIGN POLICY BEHAVIOR
• Appendix A: Variables and Clusters
• References