Psychology and Diplomacy in International Relations

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

International Relations scholarship has increasingly recognized the role of psychological mechanisms in explaining heterogeneity across actors' beliefs, preferences, and choices in a range of strategic contexts. Unpacking the microfoundations of actors’ behavior in interstate diplomacy represents a vital step towards understanding when negotiations produce peaceful agreement, breakdown into conflict, or fail to begin in the first place. The papers on this panel utilize experimental methods to enrich our understanding of how actors’ preferences and choices in international diplomacy and conflict are influenced by a variety of psychological variables: their incidental emotional states, mental models of ethnonational or religious identity, and beliefs about how foreign counterparts think. Kathleen Powers and Dalton Lin use a novel field experiment to demonstrate how economic cooperation between Taiwan and China is inhibited by a divergence in the respective sides’ mental models of their relationship. Jason Klocek likewise uses a survey experiment to demonstrate the how identity shapes public attitudes, but his focus is on how the religious identity of insurgents influences public preferences regarding counterinsurgency. Klocek argues that a myth of religious violence drives public support for violent means of countering religious insurgents. Daegyeong Kim investigates the emotional microfoundations of public preferences on a central question of international politics: whether to use diplomacy or force to counter the threat of an increasingly powerful rival. Kim pairs nationally representative public opinion surveys with survey experiments to illustrate the distinct impact of fear and anger on both Japanese and US public attitudes towards war. Whether dispositional or artificially induced, anger increases support for force and reduces support for diplomacy, while the converse is true of fear. Finally, Nicholas Campbell-Seremetis introduces and experimentally tests a theory of how people’s attitudes towards diplomatic means of crisis resolution are shaped by their beliefs about an adversary state’s judgment: their beliefs about how foreign leaders think. Campbell-Seremetis demonstrates that people are less likely to support diplomacy, and more likely to advocate force, when they believe adversary leaders are biased or delusional, and less likely to support concessions when they believe adversary leaders are incompetent.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 5: Political Psychology

Cosponsor

• DIVISION 20: Foreign Policy

Individual Presentations

• Reasoning with Madmen: How Beliefs about Adversary Judgment Impact Diplomacy - Nicholas Campbell-Seremetis, University of Chicago

• When Identities Clash: Why Taiwan Opposes Cooperation with Mainland China - Kathleen E Powers, Dartmouth College; Dalton Lin, Georgia Institute of Technology

• Emotional Substrates of Counterhegemonic Policy: Evidence from the US and Japan - D.G. Kim, University of California, San Diego; Joshua Byun, The University of Chicago; Nicholas Campbell-Seremetis, University of Chicago

• Exploring Public Support for Government Repression of Religious Insurgents - Jason A. Klocek, University of Notre Dame

Chair

• Emilie Marie Hafner-Burton University of California, San Diego

Discussants

• Tyler C. Jost Brown University

• A. Burcu Bayram University of Arkansas