The Puzzle of Coercion Failure: How Psychology Explains Resistance to Threats

• In Event: Experimental Research on the Psychology of Conflict Bargaining

Abstract

States often issue coercive threats – backed by sanctions, military force, or other consequences – to advance their foreign policy agendas. Yet IR scholars generally find surprisingly low success rates for coercion. Drawing from research in psychology, we investigate whether individual-level reactance in response to threats is one important cause of coercion failure. Reactance theory shows that when someone’s freedom to choose is threatened, they will respond by trying to restore their sense of autonomy --- in response to a coercive threat, they will be less willing to capitulate and more likely to express anger at the coercer. We test this theory with a series of experiments designed to isolate the effect of reactance by controlling for prominent alternative explanations including costs, credibility, and reputation. To control for a coercive threat’s costly consequences, we pair an intentional threat treatment with a matched scenario that imposes the same costs without intentional action. For example, if a coercer provides support to a pro-democracy movement in an oppressive regime, the regime might threaten to provide a safe haven for a terrorist group unless that support is revoked. Alternatively, the oppressive regime’s resources might be strained by the need to address the pro-democracy movement such that the terrorist group has the freedom to operate there. Importantly, the latter scenario imposes the same costs on the external actor, but we expect reactance only when a deliberate threat has been issued. Additional experiments address alternative types of coercion and separate psychological reactance from strategic reputation concerns.

Authors

• Kathleen E Powers, Dartmouth College

• Dan Altman, Georgia State University