IR as psychology

I see the discipline of International Relations increasingly as just one of several branches in the social sciences that more properly ought to be a sub-discipline of psychology.

Rational actor?

When I read economics as an undergraduate, the rational actor model was depressingly ascendant. It probably still is, though it was shaking even before the current recession. When I came to IR, I found a familiar scene – ‘rationality‘ underpinned both neo-realism and liberal institutionalism, then the dominant traditions. Constructivism was the coming force, but while it challenged theoretical rationalism, it did so in an airy sort of way, and one that was too often conflated with a critical theorist’s crusading desire to change the world rather than understand it. In frustration, more than expectation, I settled on political psychology as a good place to pitch my tent.

It was a good choice, though not, of course, ‘rational’.

IR is about the relationship between groups – states mostly , though not exclusively. We’re interested in how they form, what their ideas are, and how they behave. To my mind, that makes the discipline essentially concerned with the same questions as psychology. Security, power, decision-making: these are all key psychological themes.

Hitherto, much psychology in IR has concentrated on the key decision makers. And moreover, it has presented a cognitive psychological account of their decision making. For example, how do they use mental shortcuts to reach decisions when they are up against time and information constraints? This made psychological IR largely irrelevant to neo-realists who argued that structure was more important than agency – that the anarchy of the international system explained all, not statesmanship. That was a specious argument, similar to the idea that market forces are all there is to economic behaviour.

The larger failing was that narrow, limited view of psychology as cognitive, in which the mind is depicted as analogous with a computer, albeit one with some buggy software. Equally constraining was the concentration on the elite leadership, or at best on a small group of policymakers deciding things. At a real push, the circle extended outwards to the bureaucracy, to see how the leadership had got its existing attitudes and beliefs. We can remedy both these shortcomings, and recent work has set about doing so.

To get a richer picture we ought, for example, to consider things like emotion: what role is there in shaping behaviour for emotions like fear, anger, distress, disgust, jealousy, envy, revenge, trust, empathy, apathy and so on? Take just one example: international regimes and co-operation. Regimes built on rational actor models are always cold-hearted affairs, involving much careful cost-benefit calculus. For some realists, while the hegemon is around to enforce compliance, well and good. But as they decline, watch out. The real world, however, doesn’t seem to be like that – and it’s not just that actors miscalculate gains, in ways that a cognitive psychologist might analyse through Prospect Theory. Rather it’s that habit and sentiment play a part in shaping the behaviour of individuals and groups alike. Some classical realists understood this, allowing emotion into their accounts of human interaction in much the same way that William James and Adam Smith did.

Or take another example – the argument that we had better tough it out in Afghanistan because of credibility and reputation. Critics argue that this is not rational – the stakes there are too low; when it comes down to it, our credibility isn’t contingent on our willingness to build expensive mud-block schools while China builds aircraft carriers. And yet we persist. Why? Because emotion is involved in our decisions, perhaps. Or because having made a commitment, we want to behave consistently with it. Or maybe because it’s usually harder to accept losses than it is gamble on a gain. Those are established findings from psychology, incidentally. And they capture some older thinking – that while policy shapes war, the relationship is two-way.

In addition to emotion, we could do much more with social psychology. The state is just another group – so how do the social processes in statehood relate to other group processes? Here prominent social psychology theories like Social Identity Theory and Self-Categorisation Theory might be useful additions to the social psychological repertoire in IR that has hitherto concentrated on Groupthink. For example, how is social influence achieved? How do authority or emulation shift group norms? Is the strength of Chinese nationalism automatic, or manufactured, and what does it mean for Chinese behaviour abroad? Or some other examples: Why is it unacceptable to use chemical weapons? Why is it becoming more acceptable to intervene in the sovereign affairs of other states? What does it mean to be European? We know from a body of constructivist IR work that norms can wax and wane, and that they can help account for strategic behaviour. But we know less about how these ideas are transmitted and internalised – shaping our view of ourselves and others. Social psychology can help.

When it comes down to it, we’re pretty awful at understanding why things have happened, still less predicting what might, though of course, we seem disposed always to search for cause and effect. Consider one of the more prominent examples studied by IR scholars: Why did LBJ escalate in Vietnam? Was it his anger and frustration at a pissant enemy? Was it his fear at being thought weaker than JFK? Was it his innate tendency to be overoptimistic about what could be achieved (an extremely common trait, incidentally)? Did he miscalculate the resolve of the North Vietnamese? Was he part of a group consensus about monolithic Communist dominoes, or about what American military power could deliver? One thing’s for sure, he didn’t engage in a rational, deliberate assessment of objective, material military power, or what the implications of using it would be for the wider balance of strategic relations at the time. A strategist might hope that he would, but then that strategist should probably read some Damasio.

Tagged as: International Relations, Political Psychology, Psychology