Princeton Studies in International History and Politics

The Adaptive Advantages of Cognitive Biases in International Politics

Dominic D. P. Johnson

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691185606
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"A very timely book."—Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America
How cognitive biases can guide good decision making in politics and international relations A widespread assumption in political science and international relations is that cognitive biases—quirks of the brain we all share as human beings—are detrimental and responsible for policy failures, disasters, and wars. In Strategic Instincts, Dominic Johnson challenges this assumption, explaining that these nonrational behaviors can actually support favorable results in international politics and contribute to political and strategic success. By studying past examples, he considers the ways that cognitive biases act as "strategic instincts, " lending a competitive edge in policy decisions, especially under conditions of unpredictability and imperfect information.Drawing from evolutionary theory and behavioral sciences, Johnson looks at three influential cognitive biases—overconfidence, the fundamental attribution error, and in-group/out-group bias. He then examines the advantageous as well as the detrimental effects of these biases through historical case studies of the American Revolution, the Munich Crisis, and the Pacific campaign in World War II. He acknowledges the dark side of biases—when confidence becomes hubris, when attribution errors become paranoia, and when group bias becomes prejudice. Ultimately, Johnson makes a case for a more nuanced understanding of the causes and consequences of cognitive biases and argues that in the complex world of international relations, strategic instincts can, in the right context, guide better performance. Strategic Instincts shows how an evolutionary perspective can offer the crucial next step in bringing psychological insights to bear on foundational questions in international politics.

CHAPTER ONE

Adaptive Biases

MAKING THE RIGHT MISTAKES IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

Despite widespread claims to the contrary, the human mind is not worse than rational (e.g., because of processing constraints)—but may often be better than rational.

—LEDA COSMIDES AND JOHN TOOBY

The purist might be appalled at the arbitrary mixture of politics, sociology, economics, psychology, and history that regularly influences decisions in crises and combat, never mind the great contributions made by intuition and hunch.

—SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN

CASTING ONE’S EYE OVER any historical textbook, one does not get the impression that history was populated with and shaped by particularly rational agents. From Julius Caesar to Jeanne d’Arc, from Henry VIII to King George III, from Hitler to Trump, momentous decisions and turning points in history have hinged on the quixotic beliefs and perceptions of individual human beings—both leaders who chose courses for their country and citizens who supported or opposed them. More or less rational individuals and decisions can be found too, of course, but it is hard to argue that history has been a linear march of rationality and good sense. People have lived and died, or sacrificed others, not only for material gains but also for ideology, religion, principle, justice, pride, honor, revenge, and glory. As David Welch was moved to remark, “To read the classic texts of international relations theory, one would never suspect that human beings have right brains as well as left; that in addition to being selfish, they also love, hate, hope, and despair; that they sometimes act not out of interest, but out of courage, politeness, or rage.”¹ Even when they have fought for more rational material interests, such as for wealth or power, in so doing people have been influenced by misperceptions and biases along the way. Often, this has led to disaster. Barbara Tuchman’s March of Folly, for example, offers a litany of examples of states that managed to act against their self-interest, with personalities and psychological influences helping to bring down governments, cede territory, and lose wars.²

Recent scholarship suggests that in international politics, rational choice is in fact empirically rare, even at the top of the decision-making elite where one might—if anywhere—expect it to occur. While certain individuals are recognized for having apparently high levels of rationality, such as nineteenth-century statesman Otto von Bismarck, famous for his cold, calculating logic of realpolitik, it seems they stand out precisely because they buck the norm. More typically, leaders engage in all sorts of non-rational behavior instead. Brian Rathbun in particular has heralded, counter to common theoretical assumptions, “the rarity of realpolitik” and argues that, in contrast to the rational choice model, the preferences and decisions of national leaders tend to be characterized by alternative non-rational ways of thinking, such as pursuing visionary and idealistic goals.³ With rational choice in doubt both in practice as well as in theory, the bigger question that remains is what the consequences of non-rational behavior are for international relations. While non-rational decision-making undermines the “ideal” of rational behavior, leading at times to disaster, at other times might it also in fact bring its own advantages?

For every instance of personalities and psychological factors bringing disaster, one can offer a counterexample of other (or indeed the same) personalities and psychological factors bringing triumph. Alexander the Great was extraordinarily ambitious and sometimes reckless, but who’s to say this did not help him create one of history’s largest empires—and by the age of thirty? Julius Caesar was imperious and self-assured yet became one of Rome’s most successful military leaders and ultimately emperor, likened no less to a god. Napoleon is argued to have harbored an insuppressible ambition, but this was no doubt part of the reason he attempted to conquer most of Europe and succeeded in doing so. Winston Churchill is thought to have suffered from bipolar disorder, swinging from manic highs to depressive lows. While often debilitating, it may well have contributed to both his deep ruminations and his bold decisions. General George Patton was well known for his abrasive and aggressive character, but those very traits appear to have been part of why he was so successful as a war leader in the brutal days of World War II.

History is replete with remarkable individuals with all-too-human characteristics—Kirks rather than Spocks. And it is precisely remarkable and quirky individuals, rather than robotic rational ones, that often appear to shape that history (as well as make it more interesting). This may be no coincidence. As George Bernard Shaw suggested in his Maxims for Revolutionists, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”⁴ While historians disagree on the relative influence of individual human actors (versus broader social and economic forces) in how history unfolds, few would dispute the fact that many or a majority of the most important figures across the ages do not fit the model of a perfectly rational actor. History is a human story. And being human has brought stunning accomplishments as well as lamentable tragedies.

Strategy as Instinct: A New Approach for a New Question

The idea that non-rational behavior might offer advantages is an important one that has not been systematically investigated in politics and international relations. We might be missing something important. What if it helps in achieving strategic goals? What if cognitive biases are an important component of leadership, strategy, and security? Perhaps they help boost ambitions, identify threats, deter rivals, rally the troops, persuade allies, gain public support, or win elections, as well as help us face daunting challenges. They might also spur us to keep fighting when we’d otherwise give up. Perhaps they simply help us avoid making even more costly mistakes in the other direction—pushing us toward action and away from the dangers of inaction, for example. They will not always succeed, of course, but what is the dividing line between when they work and when they fail? Are they more useful in certain contexts rather than others? And, if they are beneficial, how can we harness or exploit them?

The tools for this novel take on cognitive biases naturally arise from the field of evolutionary biology and, in particular, the subfield of “evolutionary psychology.”⁵ Evolutionary psychologists are dedicated to understanding precisely the problem at hand: the adaptive functions of human psychological and behavioral dispositions.⁶ That is, what problems our evolved dispositions were originally “designed” to solve, how they improved reproduction and survival in our evolutionary past, how and when the relevant physiological and cognitive mechanisms are triggered, and the positive and negative effects of these biases today. This approach offers a range of novel insights, predictions, and sources of variation that can be tested with empirical data, as well as a unifying scientific theory to understand the origins, causes, and consequences of human cognitive and behavioral biases. In this book, I draw on evolutionary psychology to make two core arguments:

1. Cognitive biases are adaptations. Many cognitive biases widely invoked to explain decision-making failures in politics and international relations are in fact adaptive, functional design features of human brains. They are not mistakes or cognitive limitations but rather adaptations crafted by natural selection. This may be a surprise to some social scientists, but it is no surprise to evolutionary psychologists.
2. Cognitive biases are strategic. Cognitive biases evolved because they helped to solve strategic problems in the past, and they can continue to serve similar adaptive functions today, even among political leaders and even on the stage of international politics. The role of cognitive biases in causing mistakes is widely accepted, but their role in causing success has rarely been studied. I argue that in important decision-making domains, and indeed in some key historical cases, cognitive biases bring significant strategic advantages.

These arguments lead to a counterintuitive worldview. If we could replace our leaders, politicians, and soldiers with perfectly rational robots, who would make every decision based on unbiased information processing, I would argue that we would not want to do so. Our strategic interests are often better served by emotional, psychologically endowed human beings—even if they lead us into disaster from time to time. Decision-making in international politics typically involves the familiar challenge of managing conflict and cooperation in strategic interaction with other actors, a task that the human brain has been explicitly designed to deal with over many millions of years. Of course, there are many things that are different between individuals interacting with each other in small-scale societies (as humans have done for millennia) and states interacting with each other in the international system (which has only occurred for a few hundred years). Yet many fundamental processes of strategic interaction are similar, regardless of the type and scale of the actors involved—indeed, this is why game theory remains relevant and widely used in both evolutionary biology and international relations.⁷ Moreover, where there are differences, an evolutionary psychological approach is helpful because it allows us to predict—given the level and type of “mismatch” between our evolved propensities and characteristics of the modern environment—when cognitive biases are likely to be triggered and how they affect outcomes.

Every day, all of us are able to navigate a stream of complex social and physical challenges without knowing how, thanks to a suite of evolved heuristics and biases. As Kahneman put it, “Our thoughts and actions are routinely guided by System 1 [our intuitive thinking] and generally are on the mark.”⁸ They often work well precisely because they are not slowed or sullied by conscious mental effort. They are our “adaptive unconscious,” steering us to make good decisions—often in the blink of an eye—as they have done throughout our evolutionary history.⁹ Today, these heuristics and biases continue to aid our individual interests—and even, perhaps, national interests. Instead of finding ways to avoid or suppress cognitive biases, we should look for ways to channel them so they can better work their magic.

A Growing Trend in Adaptive Thinking

The argument of this book dovetails with a growing trend in “adaptive thinking” in the social and natural sciences. Researchers in a variety of disciplines have stressed that strict rational choice, even if attained, is not always the best strategy for achieving goals. Instead, systematic biases inherent to human nature are either more readily available or actually outperform rationality. This has been most clearly explored in the case of cognitive biases which, as discussed, help us navigate various challenges of everyday life.¹⁰ Such biases have been shown, for example, to promote performance in competition, perseverance in difficult tasks, and even mental and physical health.¹¹ But adaptive thinking is found in many other domains, a sample of which is outlined here:

• Cognitive heuristics are critical to many common tasks and activities in which rational choice alternatives are not even possible. For example, the “gaze heuristic” allows us to perform the complex task, in milliseconds, of catching (or avoiding) an object thrown at us, such as a baseball or a spear.¹² We do not gather data and solve the relevant quadratic equations. If we had to do that we’d be off the team (or dead).
• Error management theory (EMT) suggests that decision-making biases are adaptive because they help us to avoid the most costly types of errors, even if this means increasing the frequency of (less costly) errors in the other direction. For example, fire alarms are set to be highly sensitive, thus detecting all real fires even though this comes at the expense of many false alarms.^1...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Our Gift
• Chapter 1. Adaptive Biases: Making the Right Mistakes in International Politics
• Chapter 2. The Evolution of an Idea: Politics in the Age of Biology
• Chapter 3. Fortune Favors the Bold: The Strategic Advantages of Overconfidence
• Chapter 4. The Lion and the Mouse: Overconfidence and the American Revolution
• Chapter 5. Hedging Bets: The Strategic Advantages of Attribution Error
• Chapter 6. Know Your Enemy: Britain and the Appeasement of Hitler
• Chapter 7. United We Stand: The Strategic Advantages of Group Bias
• Chapter 8. No Mercy: The Pacific Campaign of World War II
• Chapter 9. Overkill: The Limits of Adaptive Biases
• Chapter 10. Guardian Angels: The Strategic Advantages of Cognitive Biases
• Notes
• Index