This outstanding book is the first to decisively define the relationship between political psychology and international relations. Written in a style accessible to undergraduates as well as ...specialists, McDermott's book makes an eloquent case for the importance of psychology to our understanding of global politics. In the wake of September 11, the American public has been besieged with claims that politics is driven by personality. Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Kim Chong-Il, Ayatollah Khameinei—America's political rogues' gallery is populated by individuals whose need for recognition supposedly drives their actions on the world stage. How does personality actually drive politics? And how is personality, in turn, formed by political environment? Political Psychology in International Relations provides students and scholars with the analytical tools they need to answer these pressing questions, and to assess their implications for policy in a real and sometimes dangerous world.
For the greater part of human history, political behaviors, values, preferences, and institutions have been viewed as socially determined. Discoveries during the 1970s that identified genetic ...influences on political orientations remained unaddressed. However, over the past decade, an unprecedented amount of scholarship utilizing genetic models to expand the understanding of political traits has emerged. Here, we review the ‘genetics of politics’, focusing on the topics that have received the most attention: attitudes, ideologies, and pro-social political traits, including voting behavior and participation. The emergence of this research has sparked a broad paradigm shift in the study of political behaviors toward the inclusion of biological influences and recognition of the mutual co-dependence between genes and environment in forming political behaviors.
Prospect theory offers a number of advantages that justify its use in the analysis of political behavior, but it also has some aspects that limit its wider applicability in political contexts. This ...article reviews recent research highlighting these successes and limitations. Future research on the incorporation of prospect theory into models of political behavior should focus on such areas as group decision-making, reference point specification, and emotion.
Often phenomena that are important to understand and predict are very rare. Rare events can prove difficult to analyze systematically because they do not generate many sampling observations. In this ...article I examine how small sample sizes can be studied scientifically. The article begins with an explanation of the distinction between research and science. I then bring to the fore the importance of counterfactual comparisons and outline the nature of the methodological problems posed by the study of small samples. These problems include challenges related to using a single case, small sample sizes, selecting on the dependent variable, regression toward the mean, explaining a variable with a constant, and using the same data to both generate and test hypotheses. I provide potential resolutions to these problems which are: (a) employing matched controls; (b) shifting or widen the category of inquiry; (c) selecting variables based on variance in the independent variable; (d) including counterfactuals; (e) ensuring that both independent and dependent variables demonstrate variation; and (f) testing potential hypotheses against data sets that are fully independent of those used to generate the hypotheses. I conclude with a discussion of future directions for undertaking a more scientific approach to using small samples.
Monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA) has earned the nickname "warrior gene" because it has been linked to aggression in observational and survey-based studies. However, no controlled experimental studies ...have tested whether the warrior gene actually drives behavioral manifestations of these tendencies. We report an experiment, synthesizing work in psychology and behavioral economics, which demonstrates that aggression occurs with greater intensity and frequency as provocation is experimentally manipulated upwards, especially among low activity MAOA (MAOA-L) subjects. In this study, subjects paid to punish those they believed had taken money from them by administering varying amounts of unpleasantly hot (spicy) sauce to their opponent. There is some evidence of a main effect for genotype and some evidence for a gene by environment interaction, such that MAOA is less associated with the occurrence of aggression in a low provocation condition, but significantly predicts such behavior in a high provocation situation. This new evidence for genetic influences on aggression and punishment behavior complicates characterizations of humans as "altruistic" punishers and supports theories of cooperation that propose mixed strategies in the population. It also suggests important implications for the role of individual variance in genetic factors contributing to everyday behaviors and decisions.
Conventional wisdom sees nuclear brinkmanship and Thomas Schelling's pathbreaking “threat that leaves something to chance” as a solution to the problem of agency in coercion. If leaders cannot ...credibly threaten to start a nuclear war, perhaps they can at least introduce uncertainty by signaling that the decision is out of their hands. It is not so easy to remove humans from crisis decision-making, however. Often in cases of nuclear brinkmanship, a human being retains a choice about whether to escalate. When two sides engage in rational decision-making, the chance of strategic nuclear exchange should be zero. Scholars have explained how risks associated with accidents, false warnings, and pre-delegation creep into nuclear crises. An investigation of how chance can still produce leverage while leaders retain a choice over whether and when to escalate adds to this scholarship. There remains an element of choice in chance. For a complete understanding of nuclear brinkmanship, psychology and emotion must be added to the analysis to explain how leaders make decisions under pressure. Human emotions can introduce chance into bargaining in ways that contradict the expectations of the rational cost-benefit assumptions that undergird deterrence theory. Three mechanisms of nuclear brinkmanship—accidents, self-control, and control of others—illustrate how a loss of control over the use of nuclear weapons is not a necessary element of the threat that leaves something to chance. Choice does not have to be eliminated for a risk of catastrophic destruction to remain.
Prospect theory scholars have identified important human decision-making biases, but they have been conspicuously silent on the question of the origin of these biases. Here we create a model that ...shows preferences consistent with prospect theory may have an origin in evolutionary psychology. Specifically, we derive a model from risk-sensitive optimal foraging theory to generate an explanation for the origin and function of context-dependent risk aversion and risk-seeking behavior. Although this model suggests that human cognitive architecture evolved to solve particular adaptive problems related to finding sufficient food resources to survive, we argue that this same architecture persists and is utilized in other survival-related decisions that are critical to understanding political outcomes. In particular, we identify important departures from standard results when we incorporate prospect theory into theories of spatial voting and legislator behavior, international bargaining and conflict, and economic development and reform.
This paper offers a theoretical argument for some of the ways in which leaders can strategically manipulate emotion and appeal to shared identity to create cohesive political identities among ...followers which allow them to overcome recruitment, coordination and collective action challenges to maximize prospects for group survival. Building on divergent strands of literature from several disciplines including political science and psychology as well as recent work in biological anthropology, this argument outlines how leaders build on a foundation of shared social identity to incite fear and outrage toward out-groups among followers. Social identity and emotion thus serve as proximate mechanisms by which leaders can develop and sustain cohesive cooperation among followers that can then be deployed at will. In this way, the most effective leaders can leverage extant psychological mechanisms to cultivate a devoted group of followers whose affective attachment to a particular political identity can be activated for a wide variety of purposes independent of actual political content or issue area.
Key individuals catalyse intergroup violence Glowacki, Luke; McDermott, Rose
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological sciences,
05/2022, Volume:
377, Issue:
1851
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Intergroup violence is challenging to understand: why do individuals cooperate to harm members of other groups when they themselves may be killed or injured? Despite progress in understanding the ...evolutionary and proximate mechanisms that underlie violence, we still have little insight into the processes that lead to the
of coalitionary aggression. We argue that an overlooked component is the presence of individuals who have a crucial role in initiating violence. In instigating intergroup violence, these
may expect to face lower costs, receive greater benefits, or garner benefits that have a greater value to them than others. Alternatively, key individuals may be motivated by individual traits such as increased boldness, propensity for aggression or exploratory behaviour. Key individuals catalyse the emergence of coalitionary violence through one of several processes including altering the costs and benefits that accrue to others, paying a greater share of the startup costs, signalling privileged knowledge, or providing coordination, among other factors. Here we integrate diverse lines of empirical research from humans and non-human animals demonstrating that inter-individual variation is an important factor in the emergence of intergroup violence. Focusing on the role of key individuals provides new insights into how and why violence emerges. This article is part of the theme issue 'Intergroup conflict across taxa'.
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