Perceiving Others’ Feelings: The Importance of Personality and Social Structure

Recent research has explored the relationship between social hierarchy and empathic accuracy— the ability to accurately infer others’ mental states. In the current research, we tested the hypothesis that, regardless of one’s personal level of status and power, simply believing that social inequality is natural and morally acceptable (e.g., endorsement of social dominance orientation, or SDO), would be negatively associated with empathic accuracy. In a sample of managers, a group for whom empathic accuracy is a valuable skill, empathic accuracy was lower for those who possessed structural power and also for those who endorsed social dominance, regardless of their structural power. Moreover, men were less empathically accurate than women, a relationship statistically mediated by men’s higher SDO and greater structural power. These findings suggest that for empathic abilities, it matters just as much what you think about social hierarchies as it does where you stand within them

The Interaction of Testosterone and Cortisol Is Associated With Attained Status in Male Executives.

Are hormone levels associated with the attainment of social status? Although endogenous testosterone predicts status-seeking social behaviors, research suggests that the stress hormone cortisol may inhibit testosterone’s effects. Thus, individuals with both high testosterone and low cortisol may be especially likely to occupy high-status positions in social hierarchies while individuals with high testosterone and high cortisol may not. We tested this hypothesis by recruiting a sample of real executives and examining testosterone, cortisol, and a concrete indicator of attained status: the number of subordinates over which the executive has authority. Despite the myriad nonhormonal factors that determine organizational promotion, the executives’ endogenous testosterone and cortisol interacted to significantly predict hierarchical position: Testosterone positively predicted executives’ number of subordinates, but only among low-cortisol executives. The results imply that reducing cortisol levels via stress reduction may be a critical goal not only because doing so will improve health but also because doing so may enhance leadership potential

Fighting for Status

Fighting for Status investigates how status concerns affect states’ decisions in the domain of international security. Ironically, while there is widespread agreement within the political science discipline and the foreign policy community that status matters, there exists relatively little in the way of focused research on how and when it does so. Thus, our understanding of status in international politics has been guided so far by intuition, not by evidence, and this has left us with a significant gap in our understanding of how status affects foreign policy behavior and international outcomes. Relying on the assumption that ‘status matters’ has left us with no extant theory of variation in states’ concern for status and little understanding of its specific implications for foreign policy or international conflict. What is needed –and what my research is designed to provide –is a systematic investigation into the ways in which the desire to increase or prevent the loss of status affects the behavior of states and leaders, especially as these concerns relate to the propensity for violent conflict. Using a diverse array of methods and data, I provide evidence on the relationship between status concerns and conflict. I use a large-n, cross-national analysis to investigate the effects of status dissatisfaction on international conflict at several degrees of intensity. I find that states that are attributed less status than they are due based on material capabilities are overwhelmingly more likely (than satisfied states) to initiate militarized disputes at almost every level of intensity. Two case studies –focusing on Germany and Russia in the World War One era –corroborate these patterns in historical cases of great importance and help to form a more complete picture of how status concerns affect political decision-making. Finally, I use a laboratory experiment and a unique sample of real-world political and military leaders to shed light on the causal pathways through which status concerns affect escalation behavior. Here I find that negative emotions are a key pathway through which concerns over relative status impair judgment and decision-making.Governmen

Replication data for: Fighting for Status

Fighting for Status investigates how status concerns affect states' decisions in the domain of international security. Ironically, while there is widespread agreement within the political science discipline and the foreign policy community that status matters, there exists relatively little in the way of focused research on how and when it does so. Thus, our understanding of status in international politics has been guided so far by intuition, not by evidence, and this has left us with a significant gap in our understanding of how status affects foreign policy behavior and international outcomes. Relying on the assumption that `status matters' has left us with no extant theory of variation in states' concern for status and little understanding of its specific implications for foreign policy or international conflict. What is needed --and what my research is designed to provide --is a systematic investigation into the ways in which the desire to increase or prevent the loss of status affects the behavior of states and leaders, especially as these concerns relate to the propensity for violent conflict. Using a diverse array of methods and data, I provide evidence on the relationship between status concerns and conflict. I use a large-n, cross-national analysis to investigate the effects of status dissatisfaction on international conflict at several degrees of intensity. I find that states that are attributed less status than they are due based on material capabilities are overwhelmingly more likely (than satisfied states) to initiate militarized disputes at almost every level of intensity. Two case studies --focusing on Germany and Russia in the World War One era --corroborate these patterns in historical cases of great importance and help to form a more complete picture of how status concerns affect political decision-making. Finally, I use a laboratory experiment and a unique sample of real-world political and military leaders to shed light on the causal pathways through which status concerns affect escalation behavior. Here I find tha t negative emotions are a key pathway through which concerns over relative status impair judgment and decision-making. The replication data contained in this archive can be used to replicate Study 2 in Chapter 5

2008) ‘Stability and Change in Belief Systems: The Operational Code of George W. Bush from Governor to Second-term President

Cognitive frameworks and belief systems are the primary lenses through which presidents view the world. Two important questions are whether these beliefs ever change significantly, and if so, what causes these changes? This article develops empirical data on the strategic and operational beliefs of President George W. Bush (GWB) as a means of examining the theoretical basis for how and why core beliefs change. The author analyzes the foreign policy operational code of President Bush in four separate phases of his political career: the immediate prepresidential phase; his nine months in office prior to Keywords: operational code; belief stability; belief change; George W. Bush T hose who study international politics and foreign policy decision making are faced with a paradox. On one hand, the beliefs of leaders seem critical to understanding their foreign policy decisions. Empirically, they are important because of the utility they provide to political leaders by-among other thingssuggesting ready frameworks for analyzing both novel and common situations and imposing order on what would otherwise be overwhelming amounts of information. On a theoretical level, they are important because of the influence they exert on many facets of international politics, from how leaders think about and respond to public opinion On the other hand, despite its central importance, our understanding of when and why beliefs change is far from perfect. A survey of the relevant literature in fields of social and cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, and political psychology reveals a surprising lack of attention paid to the question of when and why beliefs change. Do beliefs shift imperceptibly over time? Do they change instantaneously in response to traumatic events? Must a cluster of related beliefs change at the same time? Or can specific beliefs change in isolation (implying a more fragmented belief system)? In this article, I examine the issue of belief change by using the ''operational code'' construct. Operational codes are a particular subset of an individual's beliefs-those focused on the political universe. These beliefs structure and order reality for decision makers and help them to sort the signals in their environment from the noise. They exert a tremendous influence on how leaders interpret information, perceive the social environment, and make decisions. As such, they have a prima facie claim to relevance in political leadership and decision making. This article analyzes the foreign policy operational code of George W. Bush (GWB) over four distinct time periods: (1) prepresidential beliefs, (2) pre-September 11th beliefs, (3) post-September 11th beliefs, and (4) end-of-term presidency beliefs. These four periods constitute a natural experiment of sorts in which we can examine the effects of three classes of events (three independent variables) on presidential beliefs. The transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2 represents a change in GWB's political role from governor and presidential candidate to president and thus allows us to examine whether beliefs change when one's role changes substantially. The terrorist attacks of This article has both a substantive and theoretical focus. Substantively, the empirical analysis of President Bush's operational code and strategic beliefs will contribute to a greater understanding of some of his more consequential and controversial decisions. On a theoretical level, I hope to further our understanding of whether beliefs change and what types of events are likely to effect that change. Although several operational code analyses in the past have indirectly examined some of these questions and provided some relevant findings, we are still left without a theoretical basis What Are Beliefs? And Why Are They Important? Before proceeding to the analysis of GWB's belief system, it is worthwhile to briefly situate the operational code construct within the larger study of beliefs. In doing so, there are several questions relevant to this study: What are beliefs? Why are they important in the context of political decision making? And finally, what do we know about how, when, and why they change? First, we must take care to clearly define what we mean when we say ''belief.'' What is a belief? Beliefs are, in essence, that which we hold to be true. They may be propositions about causal relationships or fundamental assumptions about the way the world operates. There is also a strong element of probability in beliefs. That is, there are varying degrees of certainty in beliefs; individuals believe some propositions to be valid at a level approaching certainty while they may have relatively less confidence in the validity of other propositions but still believe them to be generally true (Fishbein 1967, 258). Beliefs are also distinct from both schemas (Larson 1994) and attitudes The Importance of Beliefs One main finding over the past half-century has been that individuals tend to filter new information through their pre-existing beliefs in such a manner as to maintain the consistency of their beliefs (Jervis 1976, 117; 2006, 651). Yet even more important than the assumed outcome (belief stability) is the fact of the process itself: beliefs act as a primary filter through which other perceptual processes operate, whether the effect is to maintain the stability or not Individuals do so because the world that they face is inherently complex. It is full of contradictions, ambiguity, and surprises. Because of their relatively limited ability to process the vast amounts of information that they are faced with, humans are, by necessity, theory driven Belief Stability Despite the central importance of beliefs in social and cognitive psychology, we are still far from understanding how, when, and why beliefs change. 1 This is because the study of beliefs has mostly focused on the mechanisms that individuals use to maintain stability in their beliefs and the debate over the extent to which beliefs systems are internally coherent. The study of beliefs has long been dominated by the premise of cognitive consistency. The important features of this model of cognition are that beliefs are stable over time, internally consistent and interdependent, and hierarchical. Cognitive consistency predicts the relative stability of core beliefs over time, as a result of the strong tendency for people to assimilate new information in such a manner as to conform with their preexisting beliefs (Jervis 1976, 118; also see Deutsch and Merritt 1965, 145). If beliefs act as a lens through which we view reality, then that lens does not seem to be readily altered. Confirming evidence is easily assimilated into our preexisting beliefs, whereas dissonant information is discredited, minimized, or ignored altogether (for more on strategies individuals use to maintain belief stability, see Nisbett and Ross 1980; for studies in the political context illustrative of this concept, see The tendency for beliefs to remain stable has been demonstrated convincingly in the laboratory. For instance, studies of belief perseverance have noted the tendency for individuals to rigidly adhere to their initial beliefs about a given proposition or causal relationship. Under experimental conditions, individuals were given initial data about some casual relationship (e.g., a firefighter's risk propensity and one's success as a firefighter) upon which they based their beliefs. Even when individuals are told or shown that the initial data were fictitious, they largely cling to their beliefs despite the new information In addition to temporal stability, cognitive consistency also assumes a belief system that is internally consistent. That is, different beliefs are consistent (or logically coherent) with one another. Much of the research in this area has focused on the strategies that individuals use to maintain internal coherence in their belief systems The last significant aspect of the cognitive consistency model is that beliefs are hierarchical. This means that any given belief can be thought of as on a continuum between core (more important and fundamental) and peripheral (less important and fundamental). More fundamental, core beliefs are highly resistant to change and help to structure other, peripheral beliefs, which are more prone to change. When a core belief does change, other peripheral beliefs should change as well to maintain internal consistency. The Operational Code Construct The concept of the operational code has a long history in the social sciences. The term was first coined by Nathan Leites in his two now classic works, The Operational Code of the Politburo (1951) and A Study of Bolshevism (1953). Leites conceptualized the responses of the Politburo to political decisions as a series of decision-making rules and axioms that constituted their worldview. He then drew on psychoanalytic theory and social psychology to account for this worldview and analyze the primary motivations and goals of Soviet leaders. The concept of the operational code languished for a decade and a half until Alexander George (1969) resurrected it in his seminal article, ''The 'Operational Code': A Neglected Approach to the Study of Political Leaders and DecisionMaking.'' Noting that Leites's original work was ''unusually complex,'' George extracted the key feature of interest to political scientists-the operational code itself-from the ''social-psychological account of the historical origins and meanings of Bolshevism'' (p. 193). George's goal in separating the operational code from Leites's ''psychoanalytic hypotheses'' was to make it more amenable to investigation using the type of methods and data that are generally available to political scientists (p. 195). The operational code does not encompass all the beliefs that influence the behavior of a given individual. And though the term itself perhaps conjures up a set of routine procedures or rules to apply mechanistically to political life, it is instead a subset of political beliefs that are especially relevant in the context of political decision making. George divided these beliefs into the philosophical beliefs (general assumptions regarding the fundamental nature of politics, conflict, and the individual) and instrumental beliefs (more specific beliefs concerning the methods leaders should use to attain the ends they desire). An individual's operational code is composed of his or her answers to the questions in table 1. The operational code as conceptualized by 2 Building on the psychological work of Converse, George and Holsti went a step further by positing the first two philosophical beliefs (''What are the sources of conflict?'' and ''What is the fundamental nature of the political universe?'') as ''master beliefs'' that acted as a primary constraint on the operational code and behavior of leaders Stability and Change in Operational Codes Despite its clear importance for the study of politics, the questions of whether beliefs change, and if so, what causes them to do so, has produced very little in the way of empirical research or theoretical development in political science. Because the operational code is quantifiable and the results of its analysis are reproducible, the examination of it can contribute a great deal to our basic understanding of belief change. Before proceeding to our analysis, it will be useful to summarize the results of the few studies that have examined how (and whether) operational codes change. However, the reader will notice that few of these studies summarized below provide concrete or generalizable hypotheses about the nature of belief change (i.e., which beliefs change, when they are likely to change, and why they change). In the past, change has generally been conceptualized as any statistically significant shift in the operational code. The statistical significance reveals whether a change has occurred, and the magnitude of the change reflects how big a change has occurred. However, there is a third dimension that is relevant but often overlooked: the type of change. Beliefs can change in one of two ways; they can be reinforced, or they can be reversed. Both types of change are important and worthy of our attention, yet there is a clear difference between the two. In one case, prior beliefs (''the world is friendly'') are reinforced (''the world is very friendly''), whereas in the other case, they are changed in the opposite direction (''before I thought the world was friendly; now I believe it to be more hostile''). 3 The literature on operational code change can be divided into two major groups: those that evaluate a given leader's operational code longitudinally (and are interested in how their beliefs evolve over time) and those that examine the effect of specific events (e.g., the end of the cold war) on the leader's beliefs. In the first group, the most important trend to note is that operational codes (i.e., beliefs) can change over time. Over the period between the 1970s and 1990s, for instance, the philosophical beliefs of both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres changed significantly: their generally pessimistic views of the world were ameliorated over the course of the two decades (Crichlow 1998, 695). In a similar vein, More recently, several scholars have examined the effects of specific events on a leader's operational code. These earlier research projects provide a significant empirical foundation for this project to build upon. The findings suggest that individuals' operational codes can change and that they can do so in a rather limited time frame (one to two years). Yet, although they provide an important foundation, it is easy to see that there are still vast gaps in our understanding of how operational codes change. Only a small handful of these projects were designed in such a way so as to distinguish between multiple potential causes of belief change. So although they were able to provide support for the notion that operational codes were more flexible than originally believed (a crucial first step in this research), they were unable to suggest how and why these changes occurred. This article builds on those works and the small number of recent projects that have examined potential belief-changing events (such as the Korean and Vietnam wars) to suggest several independent variables drawn from psychological theories of belief change and operational code analysis. The Stability of Instrumental Beliefs An interesting trend that emerges from these studies concerns which beliefs were stable and which were prone to change. The results above indicate that philosophical beliefs are more prone to change than instrumental beliefs (Walker and Schafer 2000b, 4). This pattern was found in analysis of the operational codes o

Replication data for: Losing Face and Sinking Costs: Experimental Evidence on the Judgment of Political and Military Leaders

This file contains instructions, data and code to replicate all analyses, figures and plots from published article and supporting appendices

Replication data for Status Deficits and War, International Organization, 70/3: 513-550.

Replication data for Status Deficits and War, International Organization, 70/3: 513-550

Emotions and the Micro-Foundations of Commitment Problems

While emotions are widely regarded as integral to the “behavioral approach” to International Relations (IR), a host of fundamental problems have delayed the integration of affective influences into traditional models of IR. We aim to integrate affect by focusing on commitment problems, a body of work that contains strong theoretical predictions about how individual decision makers will and should act. Across two lab experiments, we use a novel experimental protocol that includes a psychophysiological measure of emotional arousal (skin conductance reactivity) to study how individuals react to changes in bargaining power. While we find support for one key pillar of IR theory—individuals do reject offers when they expect the opponent's power to increase—we also find that physiological arousal tampers with individuals’ ability to think strategically in the manner predicted by canonical models. Our follow-up experiment mimics the elements of institutional solutions to commitment problems and finds support for their efficacy on the individual level. Our novel findings suggest that when individuals face large power shifts, emotional arousal short-circuits their ability to “think forward and induct backwards,” suggesting that emotionally aroused individuals are less prone to commitment problems

Replication data for: "Modeling `Effectiveness' in International Relations"

Are democracies better at winning wars and militarized disputes? Is there an advantage associated with initiating a war or dispute? Noting that pairwise contest data are the norm in applied research, we motivate a straightforward Bradley–Terry statistical model for these problems from first principles, which will allow for a closer integration of theoretical and statistical practice for scholars of international relations. The essence of this approach is that we learn about the latent abilities of states from observing conflict outcomes between them. We demonstrate the novelty and appeal of this setup with reference to previous attempts to capture estimands of interest and show that for many questions of concern—especially regarding ‘‘democratic effectiveness’’ and ‘‘initiation effects’’—our approach may be preferred on theoretical and statistical grounds. The evidence we find only partially supports the ideas of ‘‘democratic triumphalists’’: democracy aids effectiveness, but only in certain contexts (while in others it actually impairs fighting ability). We also provide estimates of possible ‘‘initiation effects,’’ and show that moving first seems to carry little advantage in interstate wars, but a substantial one in lower-level dispute