crisis decision-making and war(13)

Question 1

why are crisis important?

Answer 1

Crises are important because they may cause war: especially now that we live in a world of nuclear weapons, there is concern that a crisis could escalate to serious conflict. Our concern will be to examine the circumstantial effects of crises on individual decision-making.

Question 2

A crisis is a situation characterized by:

Answer 2

1): Surprise:
o Decision-makers are caught unprepared, without pre-established routines or standard operating procedures (SOPs) to handle these problems.
* (2): High threat to important values:
o The importance of what the decision-maker is trying to protect places urgency on their decisions.
* (3): Short decision time:
o Responses must be quick lest the adversary take advantage of the decision-maker’s inaction.

Question 3

Surprise and short decision-time impose cognitive limits on the decision-makers:

Answer 3

• (1): Limits on the individual’s capacity to receive, process and assimilate information about the situation.
• (2). The inability to generate the entire set of policy alternatives: this matters especially since there are no available SOPs.
• (3). Fragmentary knowledge about the consequences of each option
• (4). An inability to order preferences for all possible consequences on a single utility scale.

Question 4

States disagree on the shared distribution of power…

Answer 4

• Theory 1: Wars happen when the status quo becomes intolerable.
• Theory II: A state pre-empts a feared attack.

Question 5

Stress tends to matter more when…

Answer 5

when decision-makers have centralized control, and are highly interactive with their opponent.

Question 6

Crises, because of their threat to high values, induce…

Answer 6

stress

Question 7

Together, cognitive limits and stress contribute to…

Answer 7

a number of dysfunctional decision-making behaviors during crises:

Question 8

what are “number of dysfunctional decision-making behaviors during crises”.. (3)

Answer 8

First Order Decision-making Performance Effects:
* Attention Span: filter out complex explanations
* Cognitive rigidity: Reliance on the Schema
* Time Perspective: Time perspective: hours > glaciers.
Second Order Decision-making Performance Effects:
* Selective filtering of information: schema defines the data you look at.
* Cue awareness: less likely to notice relevant indicators
* Reliance on past experience: schema
* Importance of cognitive set: schema
* Tolerance for ambiguity: fall back on schema
* Stereotyping: reliance on schema indicators
* Sensitivity to others’ perspective:
* Resistance to pull closure: when you decide to stop info search and act\
* Importance of short run values: you discount the time perspective.

Question 9

Decision-making Tasks:

Answer 9

• Information search
• Analysis and evaluation of alternatives and their consequences
• Choice among alternatives
• Monitoring feedback

Question 10

what is Prospect Theory:

Answer 10

EUT, a rational approach, predicts that decision-makers will weigh outcomes according to their value to the decision-maker multiplied by the probability of success.

Question 11

Prospect theory shows that…

Answer 11

human cognitive biases distort these logical assumptions. It offers a theory of decision-making under risk.

Question 12

Conventional political science normally posits what type of risk behavior leaders have:

Answer 12

o Whether risk-acceptant (Adolf Hitler),
o Risk-averse (George HW Bush),
o Risk-neutral.
* These could come from backgrounds and upbringings, but there are few hypothesized systematic relationships.

Question 13

Prospect theory, based on clinical evidence, has found that choices involving…

Answer 13

gains are risk-averse and choices involving losses are risk-acceptant.

Question 14

Risk propensity therefore also depends on…

Answer 14

how the situation is framed: does the decision-maker believe they are retaking a lost possession or are merely getting more.

Question 15

what is the Endowment Effect:

Answer 15

The effects of emphasizing losses over gains
o If actors in a bargaining situation treat their own concessions as losses and the concessions they receive from their adversary as gains, they will overvalue the concessions they make to the adversary relative to the concessions they receive from the adversary.
 This makes bargaining successes less likely.
o They also heavily overweight small probabilities and underweight moderate probabilities.
 Very high probabilities that are not certain are assumed to be certain.
* Changes of probability are more valued at the extremes (very small or very great):
o People are willing to pay far more to reduce the risk of a catastrophic loss from .1 to 0 more than .2 to .1.

Question 16

Problems with prospect theory:

Answer 16

• There is a lot of clinical evidence of these individual effects, but we don’t have certain empirical evidence that they apply in decision-making at the international level.