Small-Group Temporal Discounting in Foreign Policy Decision-Making

• In Event: Disaggregating the State: Leaders, Policy Elites and Small Groups in IR

Abstract

The social psychology literature has found that discounting rates of individual group members converge on the mean discounting rate of the group, which has important implications for the study of planning and decision-making in international relations. Another important finding is that groups generally discount less than individuals do, likely due to the way in which temporal and social discounting interact. Indeed, “social temporal discounting,” as it is known, has been explored in other contexts as well, with the simple fact of a group setting leading to less steep discounting. The paper interprets these and related findings—namely, the phenomenon known as the “risky shift,” where individuals’ risk acceptance increases with the introduction of a collective decision-making process—through the lens of international relations, and tests and expounds upon the resulting framework in the context of decision-making in the US National Security Council. More specifically, memoirs and other writings of participants in NSC debates are analyzed using dictionary- and statistical classification-based text analysis methods, which provides a baseline measure of temporal orientation. NSC transcripts are used for the tracking of changes in both individual and group temporal orientation over the course of a debate, which allows us to test whether group contexts in fact bring about convergence in individual time horizons. The paper thus also presents a new, more direct approach to thinking about problems of aggregation in the study of international relations.

Author

• Max Kuhelj Bugaric, Harvard University