Foreign Policy: Why Hawks Win Why are hawks so influential? The answer may lie deep in the human mind. People have dozens of decision-making biases, and almost all favor conflict rather than concession.

This is an interesting blend of folk psychology and 'professional' psychology. The first part if completely within the realm of sensationalist junk science journalism (since it is the perex it is possible that it was not written by the authors). The second part is inaccurate but basically based on credible research.

The need to establish a deterministic connection between the ‘mind’ and human behavior is basically a religious ritual. It is part of the current belief system that we are beholden to our mind so any new “discovery” adds to the canon. (There is also the opposite belief that we have ‘free will’ which usually complements the former. Their interaction is a subject of posts in other contexts, though).

Another reason this thing has any traction at all is the fact that the liberals need to justify an otherwise unfathomable dominance of hawks in power (“they can’t help it, their minds told them so”). [It is also interesting that the authors chose to pseudo-enumerate the biases although their claims are not based on any numerical surveys.]

As the hawks and doves thrust and parry, one hopes that the decision makers will hear their arguments on the merits and weigh them judiciously before choosing a course of action. Don’t count on it. Modern psychology suggests that policymakers come to the debate predisposed to believe their hawkish advisors more than the doves. There are numerous reasons for the burden of persuasion that doves carry, and some of them have nothing to do with politics or strategy. In fact, a bias in favor of hawkish beliefs and preferences is built into the fabric of the human mind.

Of course, the  emphasized text depends on the assumption that the biased decision-making is not what "judicious" weighing looks like.

Social and cognitive psychologists have identified a number of predictable errors (psychologists call them biases) in the ways that humans judge situations and evaluate risks. Biases have been documented both in the laboratory and in the real world, mostly in situations that have no connection to international politics.

It is interesting that the authors chose to equate biases with errors (which assume a possible non-erroneous or non-biased account) and at the same time position themselves as interpreters of abstruse needlessly jargon-laden science that has nothing to do with the real world. What is even more interesting is that these are respectable authors. Yet the conclusions they draw a completely unfounded and not based on any serious research of actual political decision making. So by conflating good research data with anecdotal data they result with nothing more than a folk theory which is important in the overall system of public belief formation but does little to advance independent knowledge of human affairs.

Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel laureate in economics and Eugene Higgins professor of psychology and professor of public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. & Jonathan Renshon is a doctoral student in the Department of Government at Harvard University and author of Why Leaders Choose War: The Psychology of Prevention (Westport: Praeger Security International, 2006).