Connecting Political Science and Psychology

Right. Sort of a little aside here. One of the areas of political science that I've paid a little bit of attention to, not really an expert in it by any means, is the crossover between political science and psychology. And this has been applied in a number of different areas, looking at how voters make decisions. Lots of it has to do with decision making. There's also a... pretty good intersection with some theories of economics and particularly microeconomics and stuff like that. Anyway, what I wanted to do was give you a very quick overview of some of the ways that psychology has either been used or been introduced into the study of international relations as a subfield. Ohio State University has a center called the Merchant Center. I did some We did a workshop there a long time ago. But they've been sort of pioneers in the study of psychology and political science or political psychology. So anyway, look, if we're talking about international relations, psychology, we can think of psychology in a couple of different ways. First of all, generally, we're talking about the area that's referred to as social psychology, where we're looking at. individuals in group settings. Now the question of which level of group we're looking at is one of those levels of analysis questions, right? So when we're talking about group settings, are we talking about small groups of decision makers? Are we talking about people in a nation? Are we talking about a large crowd? Are we talking about a movement? Are we talking about relations between groups? Right, all of those are fair game. But social psychology, generally speaking, although there is quite a lot done with personality and individual information processing type ideas. So there are two ways we can look at psychology in this context. We can look at psychology as a tool of foreign policy, and we can look at psychology as a tool in our arsenal as analysts trying to understand. Now the two are obviously related. but the applied one is perhaps a little bit more straightforward. Psychological profiling, for example, has been part of what the CIA do, part of what the State Department do, since the 1960s. It sort of goes in and out of favor at various times, but just as you have sort of psychology in sports, and sports teams now employ psychologists both to help. their team members and to think about the opponents. Same is true with government departments, with the State Department, Department of Defense, CIA. So they pay attention to these sorts of things. So personality profiles of leaders. What buttons do they have? What sorts of things, what really sets them off? What do we need to avoid? Do they respond predictably? Clearly. If you're going into a negotiation or diplomacy situation, as we talked about before, the more information you have on your opponent or the person across the table from you, the better. Anybody who's been involved in any sort of negotiations knows that when you're working on strategies to achieve your ends, or when you're thinking about what's going to happen when you say something, you pay attention to who's on the other side of the table. What's motivating them? How do they respond? Do they have an ego that can be stroked and built up? Or do they just, you know, is there a particular topic that they always get really mad about? So if you want them to get mad, go to that topic. If you want to avoid getting them mad, skirt it. We do this in personal relationships all the time, not always consciously, but sometimes, right? If this topic comes up, there's going to be a fight, okay, I'll make sure that topic doesn't come up. Unless, of course, I'm in the mood for a fight, in which case I'll bring that topic up. Right? So, I mean, on a very crude level that's what we're talking about when we're talking about profiling. But, of course, you get much more sophisticated and much more detailed than that. What we're trying to do, and this is completely in tune with that behaviourist approach we already talked about, is make predictions. We're trying to predict how other people will react based on patterns of behaviour, or what we know about how they process information, or how they see the world, or what their core beliefs are, or their attitudes. all of those things, right? So anything that can give you more information is seen as an advantage in those settings. Now, do you stake everything on it? Probably not. That might not always be a wise thing to do. And in fact, for the last four or five years, it seems that in terms of U.S. foreign policy, to the extent we've had one, it It's a little bit out of favor. It sort of goes in waves. The big challenger to psychological insight and human intelligence in diplomacy tends to be the technological side, and we already mentioned that. Okay, so that's psychology as a tool of foreign policy. What about psychology as a tool for analyzing politics or to give us extra insights? Well, I think there are quite a few important general insights that we can gain and that have been sort of culled from psychology here and adopted by political scientists in different sorts of ways. So, you know, what we're looking at is clues to or identifying patterns in general human behavior. Okay, that's behavioralism. And if we can explain those patterns, identify those patterns, and see consistencies, then We can make predictions. If we know how somebody makes a decision, what they weigh up, and we know what the inputs are, we have a pretty good shot at predicting how they're going to act. So, these are the sorts of things. So, run through a couple of ones. I've mentioned profiling. So, let's sort of start with profiling. What profilers are attempting to do is they build up a biography of the individual. And then they look for particularly important events or influences on their life. They look for expressions, they run content analyses of patterns of speech, and they try and identify how certain things... One of the terms that's often used is predispositions. So, how the individual being analysed is predisposed to see the world. They carry with them a series of biases, we all do, into a situation. If those biases are known, then they can be exploited. So, can we identify particular biases? Are they particularly religious, for example, or particularly anti-religious? Do they have a particular positive attitude towards some event, some... sport, you know, whatever the particular thing. So what they're trying to do is look at both ways that individuals process information and what motivates individuals, what drives them. You know, do they have buttons that you press that can set them off? And as I mentioned before, you're familiar with this topic. You know, although you may not have formally thought about it. If you interact with other human beings at work, at school, in your family, and I suspect that you all do, then you know what I'm talking about here in terms of this process. So, identifying psychological predispositions. One way to think about predispositions is sort of lenses, right? The lenses through which you see life. That color or shape how you perceive what's going on around you. So, if there is evidence of a patterned series of responses to particular stimuli, particular events, particular topics, particular patterns of speech, then that's something that can be used. So, what do they typically use? They use things like religious upbringing, or background beliefs, or shared life experiences, or or particularly important life experiences. And those all feed into this idea of creating a personality profile. Now, that's for negotiators and for the State Department. Political scientists have formalized this in a number of different ways. So, for example, Margaret Herman, who was at Ohio State University, came up with a way of analyzing leaders. So, what she did was she thought about personality. In your American Government 101, you might have run into James David Barber's attempts to analyze presidential personality. Well, Herman's is a little different. She identifies Six key personality traits, just very quickly, and these are detailed in the PowerPoint, but these are nationalism, control perception, the need for power, conceptual complexity, and self-confidence, and the need for affiliation. So, to what extent is the person nationalistic? To what extent does the person think of themselves as in control? So, you know, George Bush, I'm the decider. To what extent is there a need for power? You know, some individuals, I'm sure you've had the misfortune to run across them, some individuals, often teachers, but also bosses and others, have, you know, seem to be all about showing you that they're in charge, right? It doesn't really matter what the circumstances, whatever it is they're doing is dominating their power and your subservience. It's a character trait. It happens. The need for affiliation. To what extent is somebody comfortable going their own way or do they need to be liked? Conceptual complexity. To what extent do they see the world as clear-cut black-white or do they see the world in terms of shades of grey? And to what extent are they self-confident? Now, self-confidence is a really tricky one because generally speaking you would I think that everybody who gets to a leadership position is probably self-confident, but it gets a little bit problematic. Sometimes some of the loudest, most assertive people are covering what is a fairly fundamental lack of self-confidence, it seems. So that one's a little bit problematic, or at least slightly more complex, although Margaret Herman did a great job in her. work of identifying it. What she essentially identified was two key types, or archetypes, of leaders. What she called independent leaders and what she called participatory leaders. So, if you think of these categories, you could think of them as sort of slider switches. Every personality has a mix of these, but if you generalize, you could say that some people have high sense of nationalism, high Sense of controlled perception, a high need for power, low conceptual complexity, and a high distrust of others. I mean, this was written 15 years ago or more, and I think that Donald J. Trump would be the poster child for that personality type, okay? And what Herman called an independent leader. Interestingly, I think Vladimir Putin would also meet that particular type, which raises some interesting questions I'll get to in a moment. The other type is what Herman called the participatory leader. Low nationalism, low control perception, high need for affiliation, a high conceptual complexity, and a low distrust of others, wants to work with others. And I think in lots of ways perhaps Barack Obama again who appeared on the scene after Herman had written this, would be a good example of that kind of character. So, the question that I'm just going to leave you with, I'm not going to attempt to answer, is what happens when similar personality types meet on the international stage, and what happens when different personality types meet on the international stage? Another way of looking at this, another insight from psychology, What was referred when it was written to by people like Jervis and Stein writing about this in the 80s and 90s was the idea of mindsets. When you have the patterned series of predispositions, these are often referred to as mindsets. The pre-existing beliefs or lenses, to use the analogy I said, which filter incoming information. in different ways. They tend to do so in ways which are relatively predictable. So, for example, you have a particular set of beliefs. Information which comes to you which confirms those beliefs is magnified in significance. Information which comes to you which challenges those beliefs is either ignored or minimized in into sort of insignificance, or the information is filtered such that it fits the beliefs. So there's quite a nice case study, John Foster Dulles, in the 60s, 50s and 60s, in the State Department. Dulles was religious, he was a staunch anti-communist, he had very clear, very strong views. He was also, he took all sorts of notes, and he was a complete pack rat. He kept all his notes as a great big archive, and so afterwards, after he... bequeath this to a library, what was visible was a lot of his thought processes. And what you see is the information coming over his desk being fairly radically reshaped and reinterpreted in some instances to fit what he thought ahead of time. Now, as social psychologists, as scientists, we know... That this is an issue, right? Experimentally, we know this sort of thing can be an issue where we filter information, we find what we're looking for, right? Confirmation bias and all of those sorts of things. But it can be... much more broad and more subtle than that. So, you know, Dulles thought, well, all communists are deceitful, all communists are bad, and then, therefore, every action taken by communists has to be interpreted in that fashion. So when the communists come and say, hey, Can we talk about arms reduction? The immediate response is they're trying to pull a fast one here. What's going on? Right? You see what I'm saying? And so contrary evidence, evidence that, you know, a Russian does a nice thing and Dulles is looking for all sorts of external motives and other things because Russians doing nice things doesn't compute. It's not possible. They can't do that. So it begins to filter information. Now, again, we all do this to some extent. We all have our predispositions, but it may be a useful analytic tool to us. The other thing about this idea of mindsets is that it becomes self-fulfilling. It becomes self-fulfilling. Okay, so if we develop this, or we can formalize this process a little bit more using another couple of terms taken from psychology, and this is the idea of cognitive consistency and psychological dissonance. So cognitive consistency is... ...is, you know, readily identifiable in most of us. We want to believe that we are consistent, right? That we don't like to think of ourselves as... ourselves as holding contradictory views. That all of our views follow logically from one another. There's not a view out there that contradicts another view out there that's a cherished or central view. Sometimes we see contradictions in our actions, so very often our actions might contradict our beliefs, but it's very disquieting if we find that we have contradictory beliefs. And so we process information in such a way as to try and ensure consistency. That's the idea of cognitive consistency. Cognitive dissonance is the idea where, I mean, it is a sort of a mechanism. where we are actually capable of holding contradictory views because we have resolved them, for ourselves at least. The way that we process them, the way that we think about them, the contradiction, which to other people from the outside might be saying, hold on, didn't you just... but what about... that is internally dissolved. That is internally dissolved. But that ability to hold the two, to achieve cognitive consistency, dissonance is that notion of the conflict between them. So when we're looking at leaders making decisions, and decision making is really where we're most interested in this, these can be very useful insights to looking at how they're processing information. Now, one of the areas that I find most interesting in this respect is the idea of perception. And to some extent these are all about perception. But, perception. When we talk about perception, of course, we're generally talking about the senses, right? How we perceive the world, and generally speaking that's through sight and... hearing and touch and all of those sorts of things. And we know that perception can be faulty. We know that we can trick people. We know that we can see things that aren't really there. We know that there are all sorts of visual games that we can play to confuse our senses of perception. But perception as an analytical tool for political scientists is quite interesting. You know, if we're trying to explain how... Why a country did something or why a leader did something. One of the questions we want to do is ask, well, how did they see it? What were they looking at and how did they see what was going on? which explains what they did. When we're looking for motifs, that's generally what we try and do. But the idea of perception can make that a bit more complicated. So we have to assume that there are, I mean, we don't have to, but the assumption for this sort of approach is that there are two environments. There is the real world. We have to accept, at least at this stage, that somewhere out there, there is a real objective world. The problem, of course, is we only have access to it through our senses, through perception. But there is an objective world. We refer to that as the operational environment. That's the environment of things that we bump into. Things that we crash into stuff, but things. That there's a ground and that there's a sky and that there are chairs and tables to trip over and all of those sorts of things. All right, so that's... the operational environment. But there is a socio-psychological environment as well. It's how we perceive that, right? That's how we perceive that environment. And we know, for example, that how we perceive the environment affects how we interact with it. Increasingly I find that I need glasses to read. If I don't put my glasses on, my perception is... Not good enough to be able to read the words on the page. My wife's eyesight is worse than mine. If she doesn't put her glasses on, she bangs into things. Right? So, we also know that when we do things, drinking for example, that changes our perceptual abilities. The way we interact with the operational environment changes. We stumble around and bang into things. Right? I'm told. So, these are the ideas. The idea of the real environment and then how we perceive that environment. And so, misperception... is when those two don't match up. So when we have dark sunglasses on and walk into a darkened room, we bang into things because we can't see it. So if you think of those lenses as the set of perceptions that we carry with us, or the mindsets, as I mentioned previously, those are the sorts of ideas. These are fairly simple, straightforward ideas, but they certainly have really big consequences when we're thinking about international decisions and how these are made and what might shape them. Now, there is a caveat we have to say here. So if we see some explanation, sorry, we see some action and we think well why on earth did they do that? And then we examine how they thought about and described the situation and went, oh, well they misperceived the environment. Okay? That might help explain why they did what they did, but it's one logical step too far to say that had they perceived the environment correctly, they would have acted differently. We can't really make that... step, because that's imputing rather too much. We can, however, look at the impact of perception and misperception. And there are some seminal early articles in International Relations on this. Art Jervis and Stein wrote a couple of them, which, if this sort of whets your interest, those are some interesting things to have a look at. Okay, so I've mentioned psychology thus far largely in an individual sense. How about group psychology? So if we're talking about making decisions, foreign policy decisions, or working inside governments to make decisions, we often have groups operating. And so there are some interesting questions, aren't there, as to is it true that two heads are better than one. Do individuals or groups make better decisions? Well the answer is of course it depends. They're both capable of making good decisions and both capable of making terrible decisions, but the reasoning might be slightly different if we look at them. You know, there are in groups there are organizational factors. In groups and individuals stress levels can influence how we make decisions. and what sorts of things, how we process information, the number of people in a group. Remember when I talked about diplomacy, I raised the problem of the difference between bilateral negotiations and multilateral negotiations. So, you know, access to information or the amount of information or the completeness of information. If we're talking about groups, how cohesive is the group? Is it a good team or is it internally divided? And, you know, what's the difference between the two? Is the group permeable? Is there anything that can come in from outside? Now, you might think that a tightly cohesive group is going to be a benefit, and it can be, just like a tight team can be a benefit in sports, but there can also be problems. For example, one of the key insights from psychology and organizational psychology is the idea of groupthink. And groupthink is the idea that it's mostly noted in stress-filled or stressful, time-bound decision-making contexts, where there is a group of people who are under pressure, and what we tend to find is that they begin to act in particular ways that lead to less than optimal decision-making. So the Bay of Pigs. in terms of Cuba, is a good example, often talked about, of groupthink in action. You might also think about the process by which the United States became convinced that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. prior to the invasion of Iraq in that same idea. So what are the key elements of groupthink? Just very quickly because I think I'm probably running out of time. You tend to get stress-induced cohesion. As time gets short, and this can be demonstrated in simulations and experimentally, but as times get short groups get tighter together and what becomes important is reaching consensus rather than evaluating information. And so contradictory information often gets dismissed. Things that... voices even, people who dare to raise challenging points of view or question the general wisdom of what's going on, often get shut down. And I've seen this happen in real life and in simulations of real life. And there is very significant pressure in the meeting to conform, to get stuff done. and therefore perhaps to ignore contradictory information and to ignore some of those challenges which you might otherwise pick up on because of this pressure. People tend to cluster around relatively neutral ideas, the extremes are pushed away, and what becomes important is doing something rather than doing the best thing. in a slightly more developed sense in economics and psychology, this is sometimes referred to as satisficing. Right? So, satisficing, which is a term used for doing something that's good enough, rather than doing something that's good, or the best. Right? So it achieves sub-optimal outcomes, but it's an outcome. Okay? So, often time and information are the things which are lacking. But groupthink is a real thing. And in the business world and in the government world, this is something which forward-thinking organizations try to combat. They often bring in outsiders to be deliberately awkward, to raise questions, to challenge, because they don't have a dog in the fight, and they can resist some of these tendencies and point out big issues which might otherwise get absorbed. Other things that you tend to see in groupthink situations, polarization of groups and those sorts of things where groups, what tends to happen is you get a magnifying of pre-existing distinctions or views. And that leads to polarization because what you see going on is sort of a interpersonal comparisons in terms of what's going on. People try and present themselves in the most favorable light possible to people like them, and when two sides of an argument do that, then you get polarization. There would be some really interesting work that might be done domestically on the political situation, perhaps using some of these insights. And finally, One of the insights that we get from psychology is how people view and process risk. So psychology gives us some really nice insights into this, many of them derived experimentally, or at least tested experimentally. The general rubric, sort of overarching title for this, is prospect theory. And what prospect theory does is, you know, how do people think about the future? This is had some significant influence in economics too. But people think about the future and they calculate risks. This is at the basis of our thought of humans as rational calculating, rational actors, that we weigh costs and benefits. Well, what prospect theory suggests, or at least part of what prospect theory suggests, is that the same individuals, so Chris McDonald, can can demonstrate rather different attitudes towards risk depending on the context. So, for example, in the context of gain, getting something, people tend to be risk-averse. So if you promise somebody a prize, guaranteed prize, I don't know, $3,000, Or you offer them an 80% shot at $5,000. They'll say, OK, so there's a 20% chance I won't get anything, right? Okay, I'll take the $3,000. What they're doing there is they're demonstrating risk aversion, right? No, no, I'm not going to, I'm going to, I'm going to take what I can get. I'm not going to, even though it's an 80% shot, you'd have to be pretty unlucky to lose out. If you're rational, you'd probably go, let me, I'll take that bet. Okay. But those same people, Chris McDonald, if they were offered a $3,000 fine. or a 20% shot at a $5,000 fine, right? Sorry, a 20% shot at nothing, an 80% shot at $5,000. So the same odds as I set up for you before. What we find is people will very often take that shot, even though the chances of them losing more are greater. Right? Now, that might just demonstrate people are really bad at math, which I think we are, but if we're really bad at math, that does call into question that notion of rational calculating.

Lots of it has to do with decision making. There's also a... pretty good intersection with some theories of economics and particularly microeconomics and stuff like that. Anyway, what I wanted to do was give you a very quick overview of some of the ways that psychology has either been used or been introduced into the study of international relations as a subfield.

Ohio State University has a center called the Merchant Center. I did some We did a workshop there a long time ago. But they've been sort of pioneers in the study of psychology and political science or political psychology.

So anyway, look, if we're talking about international relations, psychology, we can think of psychology in a couple of different ways. First of all, generally, we're talking about the area that's referred to as social psychology, where we're looking at. individuals in group settings. Now the question of which level of group we're looking at is one of those levels of analysis questions, right? So when we're talking about group settings, are we talking about small groups of decision makers?

Are we talking about people in a nation? Are we talking about a large crowd? Are we talking about a movement? Are we talking about relations between groups? Right, all of those are fair game.

But social psychology, generally speaking, although there is quite a lot done with personality and individual information processing type ideas. So there are two ways we can look at psychology in this context. We can look at psychology as a tool of foreign policy, and we can look at psychology as a tool in our arsenal as analysts trying to understand.

Now the two are obviously related. but the applied one is perhaps a little bit more straightforward. Psychological profiling, for example, has been part of what the CIA do, part of what the State Department do, since the 1960s. It sort of goes in and out of favor at various times, but just as you have sort of psychology in sports, and sports teams now employ psychologists both to help. their team members and to think about the opponents.

Same is true with government departments, with the State Department, Department of Defense, CIA. So they pay attention to these sorts of things. So personality profiles of leaders. What buttons do they have? What sorts of things, what really sets them off?

What do we need to avoid? Do they respond predictably? Clearly. If you're going into a negotiation or diplomacy situation, as we talked about before, the more information you have on your opponent or the person across the table from you, the better.

Anybody who's been involved in any sort of negotiations knows that when you're working on strategies to achieve your ends, or when you're thinking about what's going to happen when you say something, you pay attention to who's on the other side of the table. What's motivating them? How do they respond? Do they have an ego that can be stroked and built up? Or do they just, you know, is there a particular topic that they always get really mad about?

So if you want them to get mad, go to that topic. If you want to avoid getting them mad, skirt it. We do this in personal relationships all the time, not always consciously, but sometimes, right? If this topic comes up, there's going to be a fight, okay, I'll make sure that topic doesn't come up. Unless, of course, I'm in the mood for a fight, in which case I'll bring that topic up.

Right? So, I mean, on a very crude level that's what we're talking about when we're talking about profiling. But, of course, you get much more sophisticated and much more detailed than that. What we're trying to do, and this is completely in tune with that behaviourist approach we already talked about, is make predictions. We're trying to predict how other people will react based on patterns of behaviour, or what we know about how they process information, or how they see the world, or what their core beliefs are, or their attitudes.

all of those things, right? So anything that can give you more information is seen as an advantage in those settings. Now, do you stake everything on it?

Probably not. That might not always be a wise thing to do. And in fact, for the last four or five years, it seems that in terms of U.S. foreign policy, to the extent we've had one, it It's a little bit out of favor. It sort of goes in waves.

The big challenger to psychological insight and human intelligence in diplomacy tends to be the technological side, and we already mentioned that. Okay, so that's psychology as a tool of foreign policy. What about psychology as a tool for analyzing politics or to give us extra insights? Well, I think there are quite a few important general insights that we can gain and that have been sort of culled from psychology here and adopted by political scientists in different sorts of ways.

So, you know, what we're looking at is clues to or identifying patterns in general human behavior. Okay, that's behavioralism. And if we can explain those patterns, identify those patterns, and see consistencies, then We can make predictions. If we know how somebody makes a decision, what they weigh up, and we know what the inputs are, we have a pretty good shot at predicting how they're going to act. So, these are the sorts of things.

So, run through a couple of ones. I've mentioned profiling. So, let's sort of start with profiling. What profilers are attempting to do is they build up a biography of the individual. And then they look for particularly important events or influences on their life.

They look for expressions, they run content analyses of patterns of speech, and they try and identify how certain things... One of the terms that's often used is predispositions. So, how the individual being analysed is predisposed to see the world. They carry with them a series of biases, we all do, into a situation.

If those biases are known, then they can be exploited. So, can we identify particular biases? Are they particularly religious, for example, or particularly anti-religious?

Do they have a particular positive attitude towards some event, some... sport, you know, whatever the particular thing. So what they're trying to do is look at both ways that individuals process information and what motivates individuals, what drives them.

You know, do they have buttons that you press that can set them off? And as I mentioned before, you're familiar with this topic. You know, although you may not have formally thought about it. If you interact with other human beings at work, at school, in your family, and I suspect that you all do, then you know what I'm talking about here in terms of this process. So, identifying psychological predispositions.

One way to think about predispositions is sort of lenses, right? The lenses through which you see life. That color or shape how you perceive what's going on around you. So, if there is evidence of a patterned series of responses to particular stimuli, particular events, particular topics, particular patterns of speech, then that's something that can be used. So, what do they typically use?

They use things like religious upbringing, or background beliefs, or shared life experiences, or or particularly important life experiences. And those all feed into this idea of creating a personality profile. Now, that's for negotiators and for the State Department. Political scientists have formalized this in a number of different ways.

So, for example, Margaret Herman, who was at Ohio State University, came up with a way of analyzing leaders. So, what she did was she thought about personality. In your American Government 101, you might have run into James David Barber's attempts to analyze presidential personality.

Well, Herman's is a little different. She identifies Six key personality traits, just very quickly, and these are detailed in the PowerPoint, but these are nationalism, control perception, the need for power, conceptual complexity, and self-confidence, and the need for affiliation. So, to what extent is the person nationalistic?

To what extent does the person think of themselves as in control? So, you know, George Bush, I'm the decider. To what extent is there a need for power? You know, some individuals, I'm sure you've had the misfortune to run across them, some individuals, often teachers, but also bosses and others, have, you know, seem to be all about showing you that they're in charge, right? It doesn't really matter what the circumstances, whatever it is they're doing is dominating their power and your subservience.

It's a character trait. It happens. The need for affiliation. To what extent is somebody comfortable going their own way or do they need to be liked? Conceptual complexity.

To what extent do they see the world as clear-cut black-white or do they see the world in terms of shades of grey? And to what extent are they self-confident? Now, self-confidence is a really tricky one because generally speaking you would I think that everybody who gets to a leadership position is probably self-confident, but it gets a little bit problematic. Sometimes some of the loudest, most assertive people are covering what is a fairly fundamental lack of self-confidence, it seems.

So that one's a little bit problematic, or at least slightly more complex, although Margaret Herman did a great job in her. work of identifying it. What she essentially identified was two key types, or archetypes, of leaders. What she called independent leaders and what she called participatory leaders. So, if you think of these categories, you could think of them as sort of slider switches.

Every personality has a mix of these, but if you generalize, you could say that some people have high sense of nationalism, high Sense of controlled perception, a high need for power, low conceptual complexity, and a high distrust of others. I mean, this was written 15 years ago or more, and I think that Donald J. Trump would be the poster child for that personality type, okay? And what Herman called an independent leader.

Interestingly, I think Vladimir Putin would also meet that particular type, which raises some interesting questions I'll get to in a moment. The other type is what Herman called the participatory leader. Low nationalism, low control perception, high need for affiliation, a high conceptual complexity, and a low distrust of others, wants to work with others.

And I think in lots of ways perhaps Barack Obama again who appeared on the scene after Herman had written this, would be a good example of that kind of character. So, the question that I'm just going to leave you with, I'm not going to attempt to answer, is what happens when similar personality types meet on the international stage, and what happens when different personality types meet on the international stage? Another way of looking at this, another insight from psychology, What was referred when it was written to by people like Jervis and Stein writing about this in the 80s and 90s was the idea of mindsets.

When you have the patterned series of predispositions, these are often referred to as mindsets. The pre-existing beliefs or lenses, to use the analogy I said, which filter incoming information. in different ways. They tend to do so in ways which are relatively predictable.

So, for example, you have a particular set of beliefs. Information which comes to you which confirms those beliefs is magnified in significance. Information which comes to you which challenges those beliefs is either ignored or minimized in into sort of insignificance, or the information is filtered such that it fits the beliefs.

So there's quite a nice case study, John Foster Dulles, in the 60s, 50s and 60s, in the State Department. Dulles was religious, he was a staunch anti-communist, he had very clear, very strong views. He was also, he took all sorts of notes, and he was a complete pack rat. He kept all his notes as a great big archive, and so afterwards, after he... bequeath this to a library, what was visible was a lot of his thought processes.

And what you see is the information coming over his desk being fairly radically reshaped and reinterpreted in some instances to fit what he thought ahead of time. Now, as social psychologists, as scientists, we know... That this is an issue, right? Experimentally, we know this sort of thing can be an issue where we filter information, we find what we're looking for, right? Confirmation bias and all of those sorts of things.

But it can be... much more broad and more subtle than that. So, you know, Dulles thought, well, all communists are deceitful, all communists are bad, and then, therefore, every action taken by communists has to be interpreted in that fashion.

So when the communists come and say, hey, Can we talk about arms reduction? The immediate response is they're trying to pull a fast one here. What's going on?

Right? You see what I'm saying? And so contrary evidence, evidence that, you know, a Russian does a nice thing and Dulles is looking for all sorts of external motives and other things because Russians doing nice things doesn't compute. It's not possible.

They can't do that. So it begins to filter information. Now, again, we all do this to some extent.

We all have our predispositions, but it may be a useful analytic tool to us. The other thing about this idea of mindsets is that it becomes self-fulfilling. It becomes self-fulfilling.

Okay, so if we develop this, or we can formalize this process a little bit more using another couple of terms taken from psychology, and this is the idea of cognitive consistency and psychological dissonance. So cognitive consistency is... ...is, you know, readily identifiable in most of us. We want to believe that we are consistent, right? That we don't like to think of ourselves as...

ourselves as holding contradictory views. That all of our views follow logically from one another. There's not a view out there that contradicts another view out there that's a cherished or central view.

Sometimes we see contradictions in our actions, so very often our actions might contradict our beliefs, but it's very disquieting if we find that we have contradictory beliefs. And so we process information in such a way as to try and ensure consistency. That's the idea of cognitive consistency. Cognitive dissonance is the idea where, I mean, it is a sort of a mechanism. where we are actually capable of holding contradictory views because we have resolved them, for ourselves at least.

The way that we process them, the way that we think about them, the contradiction, which to other people from the outside might be saying, hold on, didn't you just... but what about... that is internally dissolved. That is internally dissolved. But that ability to hold the two, to achieve cognitive consistency, dissonance is that notion of the conflict between them.

So when we're looking at leaders making decisions, and decision making is really where we're most interested in this, these can be very useful insights to looking at how they're processing information. Now, one of the areas that I find most interesting in this respect is the idea of perception. And to some extent these are all about perception.

But, perception. When we talk about perception, of course, we're generally talking about the senses, right? How we perceive the world, and generally speaking that's through sight and...

hearing and touch and all of those sorts of things. And we know that perception can be faulty. We know that we can trick people.

We know that we can see things that aren't really there. We know that there are all sorts of visual games that we can play to confuse our senses of perception. But perception as an analytical tool for political scientists is quite interesting. You know, if we're trying to explain how...

Why a country did something or why a leader did something. One of the questions we want to do is ask, well, how did they see it? What were they looking at and how did they see what was going on? which explains what they did.

When we're looking for motifs, that's generally what we try and do. But the idea of perception can make that a bit more complicated. So we have to assume that there are, I mean, we don't have to, but the assumption for this sort of approach is that there are two environments.

There is the real world. We have to accept, at least at this stage, that somewhere out there, there is a real objective world. The problem, of course, is we only have access to it through our senses, through perception.

But there is an objective world. We refer to that as the operational environment. That's the environment of things that we bump into. Things that we crash into stuff, but things. That there's a ground and that there's a sky and that there are chairs and tables to trip over and all of those sorts of things.

All right, so that's... the operational environment. But there is a socio-psychological environment as well.

It's how we perceive that, right? That's how we perceive that environment. And we know, for example, that how we perceive the environment affects how we interact with it. Increasingly I find that I need glasses to read. If I don't put my glasses on, my perception is...

Not good enough to be able to read the words on the page. My wife's eyesight is worse than mine. If she doesn't put her glasses on, she bangs into things. Right?

So, we also know that when we do things, drinking for example, that changes our perceptual abilities. The way we interact with the operational environment changes. We stumble around and bang into things.

Right? I'm told. So, these are the ideas. The idea of the real environment and then how we perceive that environment.

And so, misperception... is when those two don't match up. So when we have dark sunglasses on and walk into a darkened room, we bang into things because we can't see it. So if you think of those lenses as the set of perceptions that we carry with us, or the mindsets, as I mentioned previously, those are the sorts of ideas.

These are fairly simple, straightforward ideas, but they certainly have really big consequences when we're thinking about international decisions and how these are made and what might shape them. Now, there is a caveat we have to say here. So if we see some explanation, sorry, we see some action and we think well why on earth did they do that?

And then we examine how they thought about and described the situation and went, oh, well they misperceived the environment. Okay? That might help explain why they did what they did, but it's one logical step too far to say that had they perceived the environment correctly, they would have acted differently. We can't really make that... step, because that's imputing rather too much.

We can, however, look at the impact of perception and misperception. And there are some seminal early articles in International Relations on this. Art Jervis and Stein wrote a couple of them, which, if this sort of whets your interest, those are some interesting things to have a look at.

Okay, so I've mentioned psychology thus far largely in an individual sense. How about group psychology? So if we're talking about making decisions, foreign policy decisions, or working inside governments to make decisions, we often have groups operating.

And so there are some interesting questions, aren't there, as to is it true that two heads are better than one. Do individuals or groups make better decisions? Well the answer is of course it depends.

They're both capable of making good decisions and both capable of making terrible decisions, but the reasoning might be slightly different if we look at them. You know, there are in groups there are organizational factors. In groups and individuals stress levels can influence how we make decisions. and what sorts of things, how we process information, the number of people in a group. Remember when I talked about diplomacy, I raised the problem of the difference between bilateral negotiations and multilateral negotiations.

So, you know, access to information or the amount of information or the completeness of information. If we're talking about groups, how cohesive is the group? Is it a good team or is it internally divided?

And, you know, what's the difference between the two? Is the group permeable? Is there anything that can come in from outside?

Now, you might think that a tightly cohesive group is going to be a benefit, and it can be, just like a tight team can be a benefit in sports, but there can also be problems. For example, one of the key insights from psychology and organizational psychology is the idea of groupthink. And groupthink is the idea that it's mostly noted in stress-filled or stressful, time-bound decision-making contexts, where there is a group of people who are under pressure, and what we tend to find is that they begin to act in particular ways that lead to less than optimal decision-making.

So the Bay of Pigs. in terms of Cuba, is a good example, often talked about, of groupthink in action. You might also think about the process by which the United States became convinced that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

prior to the invasion of Iraq in that same idea. So what are the key elements of groupthink? Just very quickly because I think I'm probably running out of time.

You tend to get stress-induced cohesion. As time gets short, and this can be demonstrated in simulations and experimentally, but as times get short groups get tighter together and what becomes important is reaching consensus rather than evaluating information. And so contradictory information often gets dismissed. Things that... voices even, people who dare to raise challenging points of view or question the general wisdom of what's going on, often get shut down.

And I've seen this happen in real life and in simulations of real life. And there is very significant pressure in the meeting to conform, to get stuff done. and therefore perhaps to ignore contradictory information and to ignore some of those challenges which you might otherwise pick up on because of this pressure.

People tend to cluster around relatively neutral ideas, the extremes are pushed away, and what becomes important is doing something rather than doing the best thing. in a slightly more developed sense in economics and psychology, this is sometimes referred to as satisficing. Right?

So, satisficing, which is a term used for doing something that's good enough, rather than doing something that's good, or the best. Right? So it achieves sub-optimal outcomes, but it's an outcome.

Okay? So, often time and information are the things which are lacking. But groupthink is a real thing. And in the business world and in the government world, this is something which forward-thinking organizations try to combat. They often bring in outsiders to be deliberately awkward, to raise questions, to challenge, because they don't have a dog in the fight, and they can resist some of these tendencies and point out big issues which might otherwise get absorbed.

Other things that you tend to see in groupthink situations, polarization of groups and those sorts of things where groups, what tends to happen is you get a magnifying of pre-existing distinctions or views. And that leads to polarization because what you see going on is sort of a interpersonal comparisons in terms of what's going on. People try and present themselves in the most favorable light possible to people like them, and when two sides of an argument do that, then you get polarization.

There would be some really interesting work that might be done domestically on the political situation, perhaps using some of these insights. And finally, One of the insights that we get from psychology is how people view and process risk. So psychology gives us some really nice insights into this, many of them derived experimentally, or at least tested experimentally.

The general rubric, sort of overarching title for this, is prospect theory. And what prospect theory does is, you know, how do people think about the future? This is had some significant influence in economics too.

But people think about the future and they calculate risks. This is at the basis of our thought of humans as rational calculating, rational actors, that we weigh costs and benefits. Well, what prospect theory suggests, or at least part of what prospect theory suggests, is that the same individuals, so Chris McDonald, can can demonstrate rather different attitudes towards risk depending on the context. So, for example, in the context of gain, getting something, people tend to be risk-averse.

So if you promise somebody a prize, guaranteed prize, I don't know, $3,000, Or you offer them an 80% shot at $5,000. They'll say, OK, so there's a 20% chance I won't get anything, right? Okay, I'll take the $3,000.

What they're doing there is they're demonstrating risk aversion, right? No, no, I'm not going to, I'm going to, I'm going to take what I can get. I'm not going to, even though it's an 80% shot, you'd have to be pretty unlucky to lose out. If you're rational, you'd probably go, let me, I'll take that bet. Okay.

But those same people, Chris McDonald, if they were offered a $3,000 fine. or a 20% shot at a $5,000 fine, right? Sorry, a 20% shot at nothing, an 80% shot at $5,000. So the same odds as I set up for you before.

What we find is people will very often take that shot, even though the chances of them losing more are greater. Right? Now, that might just demonstrate people are really bad at math, which I think we are, but if we're really bad at math, that does call into question that notion of rational calculating.

Transcript for:Connecting Political Science and Psychology

Transcript for:
Connecting Political Science and Psychology