American Negativity Bias and Costly Signals in International Relations

• In Event: The Psychology of Terrorism and International Relations

Abstract

Why do people believe some state signals but not others? More broadly, how do people infer other states’ intentions and make decisions regarding the potential use of force? The logic of costly signals in international relations literature explains when and how rational actors update their prior beliefs and in turn make decisions. According to the logic, rational actors update their beliefs about a state’s intentions when the state takes the actions incurring a high cost which a state hiding its true intentions cannot bear. This paper argues that the credibility of state actions varies depending on the type of state actions (i.e., whether state actions are benign or aggressive), not just the cost of the signals.

My survey experiments in this study show that people have a negativity bias in perceiving state actions and making foreign policy decisions: “(t)he psychological phenomenon that people tend to attach greater weight to negative information than to equally extreme and equally likely positive information in a variety of information-processing tasks” (Aragones 1997, 189).” In response to the scenario of experiments of this study, survey participants tended to pay more attention to a state’s aggressive actions than peaceful ones, thus weighing negative information more than positive information in assessing the credibility of state actions.

Based on this finding, this paper proposes a negativity bias thesis: people tend to take other states’ aggressive actions as conclusive evidence of deep hostility and are skeptical of the credibility of conciliatory gestures. Such a habit will help people respond to threats by making people sensitive to potential threats but it may also be an obstacle in de-escalating crises by making people falsely miss cooperative intentions from an opposition state who could have turned to be a friend. This psychological mechanism is a strong foundation for theorizing about how individuals process information embedded in state signals and can help make our understanding of signaling more robust. The findings of this paper speak to the larger debate about the promises and limits of the rationalist theory of international politics at the micro level.

Author

• Seok Joon Kim, Korea University