The cognitive calculus theory of foreign policy decision making is an attempt to bridge the gap between two research orientations in the international relations literature: outcome validity and process validity. The cognitive calculus theory models the mental calculations of foreign policy decision making with the premise that an individual conducts the decision-making process and the model should therefore represent his or her capabilities. An experiment tested a few of the model's derivations concerning the effects of the quality of information on process and choice parameters. The results support major aspects of the cognitive calculus theory. Relevant items are attended to more carefully than irrelevant items and speed up the decision process. Furthermore, the valence of the relevant items disposes the choice of a corresponding option. The consequences of plugging the information set used in the experiment into the mathematical model of cognitive calculus show that human behavior parallels the model's predictions.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Alin, Erika G. 1994. The United States and the 1958 Lebanon crisis. New York: University Press of America.
2.
Anderson, Norman H. 1981. Foundations of information integration theory. New York: Academic Press.
3.
Anderson, Norman H. 1990. The adaptive character of thought. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
4.
Axelrod, Robert , ed. 1976. Structure of decision: The cognitive maps of political elites. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
5.
Bassok, Miriam , and Yaacov Trope. 1983-84. People's strategies for testing hypotheses about another's personality: Confirmatory or diagnostic?Social Cognition2:199-216.
6.
Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce , and David Lalman. 1990. Domestic opposition and foreign war. American Political Science Review84:747-765.
7.
Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce , and David Lalman. 1992. War and reason: Domestic and international imperatives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
8.
Einhorn, Hillel J. , Don N. Kleinmuntz, and Benjamin Kleinmuntz. 1979. Linear regression and process-tracing models of judgment. Psychological Review86:465-485.
9.
Fiske, Susan T. , and Shelley E. Taylor. 1991. Social cognition. 2d ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.
10.
George, Alexander L. 1979. The causal nexus between cognitive beliefs and decision-making behavior: The “operational code” belief system. In Psychological models in international politics, edited by Lawrence S. Falkowski. Boulder, CO: Westview.
11.
Geva, Nehemia , Russell Driggers, and Alex Mintz. 1996. Effects of ambiguity on strategy and choice in foreign policy decision making: An analysis using computerized process tracing. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 29-September 1, 1996, San Francisco, California.
12.
Geva, Nehemia , and James Mayhar. 1997. The cognitive calculus of decisions on the use of force. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 28-31, Washington D.C.
13.
Geva, Nehemia , and J. Mark Skorick. 1999. Information inconsistency and the cognitive algebra of foreign policy decision making. International Interactions25:333-362.
14.
Gilliland, Stephen W. , and Neal Schmitt. 1993. Information redundancy and decision behavior: A process tracing investigation. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes54:157-180.
15.
Guilmartin, John F. 1995. A very short war: The SS Mayaguez and the battle of Koh Tang. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.
16.
Head, Richard G. , Frisco W. Short, and Robert C. McFarlane. 1978. Crisis resolution: Presidential decision making in the Mayaguez and Korean confrontations. Boulder, CO: Westview.
17.
Herek, Gregory M. , Irving L. Janis, and Paul Huth. 1987. Decision making during international crises: Is quality of process related to outcome?Journal of Conflict Resolution31:203-226.
18.
Hermann, Charles F. 1972. International crises: Insights from behavioral research. New York: Free Press.
19.
Herrmann, Richard K. , James F. Voss, Tonya Y. E. Schooler, and Joseph Ciarrochi. 1997. Images in international relations: An experimental test of cognitive schemata. International Studies Quarterly41:403-433.
20.
Hogarth, Robin . 1987. Judgment and choice. New York: John Wiley.
21.
Holsti, Ole . 1976. Foreign policy formation viewed cognitively. In Structure of decision: The cognitive maps of political elites, edited by Robert Axelrod. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
22.
James, Patrick , and John R. Oneal. 1991. The influence of domestic and international politics in the president's use of force. Journal of Conflict Resolution35:307-332.
23.
Jervis, Robert . 1976. Perception and misperception in international politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
24.
Kruglanski, Arie W. , and Icek Ajzen. 1983. Bias and error in human judgment. European Journal of Social Psychology19:448-468.
25.
Kruglanski, Arie W. , and Thomas E. Ford. 1995. Effects of epistemic motivations on the use of accessible constructs in social judgment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin21:950-962.
26.
Kunda, Ziva . 1999. Social cognition: Making sense of people. Cambridge: MIT Press.
27.
Kunda, Ziva , and Kathryn C. Oleson. 1997. When exceptions prove the rule: How extremity of deviance determines the impact of deviant examples on stereotypes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology72:965-979.
28.
Lamb, Christopher J. 1989. Belief systems and decision making in the Mayaguez crisis. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.
29.
Lerner, Jennifer S. , and Philip E. Tetlock. 1999. Accounting for the effects of accountability. Psychological Bulletin125:2555-275.
30.
Lingle, John H. , Nehemia Geva, Thomas M. Ostrom, Michael R. Leippe, and Michael H. Baumgardner. 1979. Thematic effects of person judgments on impression organization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology37:674-687.
31.
Lodge, Milton . 1995. Toward a procedural model of candidate evaluation. In Political judgment: Structure and process, edited by Milton Lodge and Kathleen M. McGraw. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
32.
Lodge, Milton , Kathleen M. McGraw, and Patrick Stroh. 1989. An impression-driven model of candidate evaluation. American Political Science Review83:399-419.
33.
Lodge, Milton , and Patrick Stroh. 1993. Inside the mental voting booth. In Explorations in political psychology, edited by Shanto Iyengar and William McGuire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
34.
Maoz, Zeev . 1990. National choices and international processes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
35.
Marcus, George E.1988. The structure of emotional response: 1984 presidential candidates. American Political Science Review82:737-761.
36.
Marcus, George E. , and Michael B. Mackuen. 1993. Anxiety, enthusiasm, and the vote: The emotional underpinnings of learning and involvement during presidential campaigns. American Political Science Review87:672-685.
37.
Marcus, George E. , Sandra L. Wood, and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse. 1998. Linking neuroscience to political intolerance and political judgment. Politics and the Life Sciences17:165-178.
38.
Mintz, Alex . 1997. Foreign policy decision making: Bridging the gap between the cognitive psychology and rational actor “schools.” In Decisionmaking on war and peace: The cognitive-rational debate, edited by Nehemia Geva and Alex Mintz. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
39.
Mintz, Alex , and Nehemia Geva. 1997. The poliheuristic theory of foreign policy decisionmaking. In Decisionmaking on war and peace: The cognitive-rational debate, edited by Nehemia Geva and Alex Mintz. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
40.
Mintz, Alex , Nehemia Geva, Steven B. Redd, and Amy Carnes. 1997. The effect of dynamic and static choice sets on political decision making: An analysis using the decision board platform. American Political Science Review91:553-566.
41.
Morrow, James D. 1997. A rational choice approach to international conflict. In Decisionmaking on war and peace: The cognitive-rational debate, edited by Nehemia Geva and Alex Mintz. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
42.
Nisbett, R. E. , Zukier, H., and Lemley, R. E.1981. The dilution effect: Non-diagnostic information weakens the implications of diagnostic information. Cognitive Psychology13:248-277.
43.
Ostrom, Charles W. Jr. , and Brian L. Job. 1986. The president and the political use of force. American Political Science Review80:541-566.
44.
Ostrom, Thomas , John H. Lingle, John B. Pryor, and Nehemia Geva. 1980. Cognitive organization of person impressions. In Person memory: The cognitive basis of social perception, edited by Reid Hastieet al.Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
45.
Rahn, Wendy M. , John H. Aldrich, Eugene Borgida, and John L. Sullivan. 1990. A social-cognitive model of candidate appraisal. In Information and democratic processes, edited by John A. Ferejohn and James H. Kuklinski. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
46.
Rowan, Roy. 1975 . The four days of Mayaguez. New York: Norton.
47.
Schmitt, Neal , and Arthur L. Dudycha. 1975. A reevaluation of the effect of cue redundancy in multiple-cue probability learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory104:307-315.
48.
Schwartz, Jeffrey P. , and Kent L. Norman. 1989. Separating cue relevance from cue importance within models of judgment and decision making. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes43:355-384.
49.
Simon, Herbert . 1957. A behavioral model of rational choice. In Models of man, edited by Herbert Simon. New York: John Wiley.
50.
Snyder, Richard C. , H. W. Bruck, and Burton Sapin, eds. 1962. Foreign policy decision-making: An approach to the study of international politics. New York: Free Press.
51.
Stein, Janice Gross , and Raymond Tanter. 1980. Rational decision making: Israel's security choices, 1967. Columbus: Ohio University Press.
52.
Taber, Charles S.1992. POLI: An expert system model of U.S. foreign policy belief systems. American Political Science Review86:888-904.
53.
Taber, Charles S. , and Marco R. Steenbergen. 1995. Computational experiments in electoral behavior. In Political judgment, edited by Milton Lodge and Kathleen M. McGraw. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
54.
Tetlock, Philip E. 1992. The impact of accountability on judgment and choice: Toward a social contingency model. In Advances in experimental social psychology, edited by Mark P. Zanna. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
55.
Tetlock, Philip E. , and Richard Boettger. 1989. Social and cognitive strategies for coping with accountability: Conformity, complexity, and bolstering. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology57:632-640.
56.
Trope, Yaacov , and Miriam Bassok. 1982. Accountability: A social magnifier of the dilution effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology57:388-398.
57.
Vertzberger, Yaacov Y.I. 1990. The world in their minds: Information processing, cognition, and perception in foreign policy decisionmaking. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
58.
Walker, Stephen G.1977. The interface between beliefs and behaviors: Henry Kissinger's operational code in the Vietnam War. Journal of Conflict Resolution21:129-168.
59.
Walker, Stephen G.1983. The motivational foundations of political belief systems: A re-analysis of the operational code construct. International Studies Quarterly27:179-201.
60.
Young, Michael D.1996. Cognitive mapping meets semantic networks. Journal of Conflict Resolution40:395-414.
61.
Zajonc, Robert B.1984. On the primacy of affect. American Psychologist39:117-123.
62.
Zinnes, Dina A.1966. A comparison of hostile behavior of decision makers in simulated and historical data. World Politics18:474-502.
