How Statesmen Think

The Psychology of International Politics

Robert Jervis

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400885336
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Robert Jervis has been a pioneering leader in the study of the psychology of international politics for more than four decades. How Statesmen Think presents his most important ideas on the subject from across his career. This collection of revised and updated essays applies, elaborates, and modifies his pathbreaking work. The result is an indispensable book for students and scholars of international relations. How Statesmen Think demonstrates that expectations and political and psychological needs are the major drivers of perceptions in international politics, as well as in other arenas. Drawing on the increasing attention psychology is paying to emotions, the book discusses how emotional needs help structure beliefs. It also shows how decision-makers use multiple shortcuts to seek and process information when making foreign policy and national security judgments. For example, the desire to conserve cognitive resources can cause decision-makers to look at misleading indicators of military strength, and psychological pressures can lead them to run particularly high risks. The book also looks at how deterrent threats and counterpart promises often fail because they are misperceived. How Statesmen Think examines how these processes play out in many situations that arise in foreign and security policy, including the threat of inadvertent war, the development of domino beliefs, the formation and role of national identities, and conflicts between intelligence organizations and policymakers.

PART I

Political Psychology

1

Understanding Beliefs

The question with which M. Brewster Smith, Jerome Bruner, and Robert White began their classic Opinions and Personality fifty years ago is still appropriate today, albeit with more linguistic sensitivity toward gender: “Of what use to man are his opinions?”¹ I think their answer was essentially correct as well: People adopt opinions not only to understand the world, but also to meet the psychological and social needs to live with themselves and others. I want to use this basic insight to examine some of the puzzles in what people believe. Since I specialize in international politics, I will draw most of my examples from that realm but do not think that our findings are limited to this arena.²

Beliefs and Related Concepts

There are terminological and conceptual thickets surrounding the words we use here. I will focus on beliefs partly about facts but more about cause-and-effect relationships. How do things work? Why do others act as they do? What will be the consequences of my own behavior? Definitions of related terms differ, and the notions of beliefs, opinions, attitudes, ideas, and even policy preferences overlap and interweave. Attitudes and opinions involve a strong evaluative component. Indeed, this dimension often dominates, as when people say they have a negative attitude toward radical Islam even if they know little about it. But when an attitude is different from a purely subjective taste, it also involves causal claims. For example, I abhor radical Islam because I think it produces oppression and violence toward other religions.

OVERTONES OF BELIEFS

Although my focus is on beliefs in the sense of what people think about causes and effects, it is noteworthy that the term is used in other senses as well, and I think this tells us that equating beliefs with scientific or social scientific knowledge would be limiting. Although political psychologists rarely deal with statements like the following, they are important to people’s lives: “I believe in God.” “I believe I am falling in love.” “I believe that it is vital to win the war in Iraq.” Even this abbreviated list illustrates three things. First, beliefs can refer to inner states as well as outer realities. We often interpret our feelings and seek to understand exactly what it is that we believe. Second, beliefs and statements about beliefs can be exhortatory. To say “I believe we must do this” is to urge others—and ourselves—on. Statements like “I believe my views will prevail” combine these two elements.

The third and perhaps most important point is that many beliefs have a strong element of commitment and faith, even when religion is not involved. Scientists say that they believe in their theories or findings, and this often means not only that they have confidence in their validity, but that their claims are important to them and that it is important that others accept them as well. When people talk about “beliefs to live by,” moral and empirical considerations are fused. When people say that they believe that democracy can be brought to the Middle East and that doing so will make this a better world, they are combining how they see the evidence and what their values and desires lead them to think should and must be true. In the early 1950s CBS’s lead commentator, Edward R. Murrow, broadcast a series of five-minute episodes entitled This I Believe in which famous and everyday people explained their outlooks and personal philosophies in an attempt to solidify American faith in their country in the face of the dual challenges of communism and McCarthyism. The other side of this coin is revealed by a doctor’s response to his critics’ rejection of his findings that a controversial treatment helped many heart attack victims: he said his detractors suffered from “emotional disbelief.”³

One can argue that this shows only that the word “belief” has multiple meanings and that we would be better off separating them and attaching different labels to each. I suspect, however, that the common term may be pointing to something deeper, which is the inextricable role of emotion in sensible thought. Over the past decade or so, psychologists and political psychologists have come to see (or to “believe”?) that a sharp separation between cognition and affect is impossible and that a person who embodied pure rationality, undisturbed by emotion, would be a monster if she were not an impossibility.⁴

Investigating Beliefs

We want to understand why people believe what they do, whether these beliefs are warranted by the available evidence, and whether they are correct. Although these tasks are different, we often fuse them. Thus we often think that correct beliefs require no explanation, implicitly assuming that they are self-evident and follow directly from commonly available evidence. But we often believe as much in the face of evidence as because of it, and in some of these cases we turn out to be correct. In other cases, correct beliefs may be adopted to smooth our relations with others or to increase our psychological comfort.

INCORRECT BELIEFS MAY BE SINCERE AND SENSIBLE

It is then tempting, but a mistake, to seek to explain correct beliefs in a way fundamentally different from the way we explain incorrect ones.⁵ Nevertheless, people are prone to associate faulty reasoning processes with incorrect beliefs even when more careful analysis would indicate that this comforting association does not hold. Given the complexity and ambiguity of our world, it is unfortunately true that beliefs for which a good deal of evidence can be mustered often turn out to be mistaken.⁶

In parallel, we often have difficulty taking seriously beliefs with which we disagree. This is not only a mistake, it is also disrespectful of the people we are trying to understand. When someone believes something that we cannot, we often ask whether she is a fool or a knave. This is obviously most likely to be the case with beliefs that are now unpopular. Thus because most academics believe that it was a mistake for the United States to have fought in Vietnam, they cannot believe that a sensible person could have accepted the validity of the domino theory.⁷ Rather than explore what evidence the people who held these beliefs pointed to, what theories of politics were implicitly evoked, and why a more complacent view did not seem compelling, these academics seek hidden motives and psychological pressures. These may indeed have been present, but the fact that most of us now find the domino theory disastrously incorrect should not lead us to conclude it was not central to decision-makers.

Grasping others’ incorrect beliefs also poses severe difficulties for contemporary observers. Thus it was very hard for American leaders to believe that Japan would attack Pearl Harbor, even though they (partly) expected an attack against the Philippines. Knowing that Japan could not win this war made the Japanese beliefs inaccessible. During the run-up to the war in Iraq it was similarly impossible for outsiders to see that Saddam Hussein was more afraid of his generals, his people, and Iran than he was of the United States, with the result that everyone, even opponents of the war, concluded that his refusal to fully cooperate with the UN showed that he was developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

It is especially hard to appreciate the beliefs that upheld views that are now morally unacceptable, for example, those supporting slavery. It is then very tempting to attribute the beliefs to economic interests, which spares us the difficulty and the pain of reconstructing a worldview in which slavery appeared appropriate, effective, and beneficial for all. The line between understanding and approving is too thin to make this a comfortable task.

AMBIVALENCE AND UNAWARENESS

It may be hard to tell what a person believes because she is ambivalent, confused, or contradictory. We sometimes say that a person does not know her own mind, and we often half believe something, or simultaneously believe it and do not. I think this was the case with whether Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger believed that the peace agreement with North Vietnam could be sustained. They were under no illusions that the North had given up its commitment to take over the South. With its troops already in the South and a large army on its own territory, the North could be restrained only by the fear that blatantly breaking the agreement would call up an American military response, most obviously a resumption of bombing. When the agreement was signed, Nixon and Kissinger told themselves, each other, and the South Vietnamese that this threat was credible enough to prevent major North Vietnamese violations, and that if did not avert aggression from the North, the Americans would carry it out. While it is impossible to be certain whether Nixon and Kissinger believed what they were saying, my guess is that what they were expressing was something between a hope and an expectation. They partly believed it, or believed it on some days but not others, or believed it with some probability but less than certainty. A related way of thinking was revealed by the diary entry of a top Foreign Office official after Hitler seized the non-German parts of Czechoslovakia: “I always said that, as long as Hitler could pretend he was incorporating Germans in the Reich, we could pretend that he had a case.”⁸

Further problems are created by the fact that the driving beliefs may be so widely shared they need never be expressed, at least not in a way that is connected with specific actions. Because they are rarely analyzed by the person, we often call these beliefs “assumptions,” and we need to excavate them, as James Joll did in his essay “1914: The Unspoken Assumptions,” in which he argues that specific beliefs say less about the origins of World War I than does the prevailing intellectual climate that was built on Social Darwinism, honor, and other ideas that the leaders had absorbed in school.⁹ In other cases, the driving beliefs may not be voiced because they are disreputable or illegitimate. Thus a search of even confidential or private documents will rarely reveal an American decision-maker saying that he favored overthrowing a Third World regime in order to benefit American corporations or further his own domestic political interests. Although the person will not express these views, here he or she perhaps is aware of them.

In a third category of cases even this is not true (and one might therefore question whether the ideas that motivate us should be called beliefs at all). It is not only those schooled in psychoanalysis who argue that we do not understand how we reach many of our conclusions because much cognitive processing is beyond the reach of conscious thought.¹⁰ The reasons we give for many of our beliefs are sincere in that we do believe them, but these are stories we tell ourselves as well as others because we understand as little about what is driving our beliefs as we do about what is driving others. To extend the previous example, someone who was in fact moved to favor military intervention because of economic of political interests might not be aware of this because of the strong societal norms of putting national security interests first. All we can do is infer operative beliefs from behavior, often by arguing that the explicit reasons given are implausible. As I noted earlier, this is how many scholars explain the U.S. policy in Vietnam. It is not surprising that arguments in this vein will be particularly contentious. Those who use egodynamics may look for Freudian slips, and Marxists will look for benefits accruing to large corporations, but it is hard to get evidence that will carry weight with people who approach these questions from different perspectives. Skepticism here, like that called up by the concept of false consciousness, is warranted but does not do away with the problem that people’s self-knowledge is sharply limited.

Understand Beliefs

Understanding beliefs means trying to fathom what caused them and what consequences they had. We are interested in whether beliefs are powerful in the sense of producing behavior and autonomous in the sense of not directly following from other factors. To return to the Smith, Bruner, and White formulation, this means trying to determine the relative weights of reality appraisal, personal needs, and social adjustment. The latter two are similar in that they serve purposes other than seeking an accurate view of the world, and we can refer to them together as a functional explanation because they explain the person’s beliefs by the social and psychological functions that they serve. This is not to say that the line between appraisal and functionality is always clear or to deny that many of the ways in which we try to make sense of our world combine these approaches. Susan Clancy’s fascinating and empathetic but not credulous study of why people come to believe that they have been abducted by space aliens shows how this belief not only renders coherent what was previously confused, but also provides an explanation that, while disturbing on one level, gives a meaning that restores a form of integrity to the person’s life.¹¹ One chapter is titled “Why Would I Want to Believe It?” which indicates both that people ward off attacks on their beliefs by claiming there could be no ulterior (or interior) motive and that there can be quite different but reinforcing reasons for holding beliefs.

CONSISTENCY AND EXCESS REASONS

It is often hard to tell what beliefs are causal, not only in separating statements the person knows are false from what she “really” believes, but in the sense of determining which of a plethora of justifications played the largest role in guiding behavior. In examining the beliefs that precede action, we often find claims that contradict or are in some tension with one another and see people generating more arguments for the conclusions than would be necessary to produce them. While these two phenomena are in one sense opposites, the first revealing inconsistencies and the second displaying excess reasons or belief overkill, they have common psychological roots in the conflicting needs of reality appraisal and serving psychological, social, and political functions. In the end, definitive...