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"Emotion in Elite Decision Making"
by Rose McDermott
In his recent review of emotion in politics, George Marcus noted that, “[r]esearchers have been divided into two groups—those who study leaders and those who study publics" (Marcus, 2000, 221). Indeed, this observation could be equally well applied to scholars of political psychology more generally. In examining the impact of emotion on politics and political decision making, another division could just as easily be overlaid as well. Specifically, those who study American politics tend to focus on the investigation of mass public opinion and political behavior, especially voting, while those in international relations emphasize elite decision making. As a political psychologist who studies international relations, I will reflect on the impact of emotion on leader decision making in this commentary.
In the popular press, the role of emotion in elite foreign policy decision making concentrates on the role of leaders in manipulating mass audiences, or on the impact of emotion on citizen judgments of political affairs. Yet these perspectives do not constitute the sole influence of emotion on leaders. Leaders themselves, as human beings, remain subject to the power emotion exerts on decision making, like everyone else, although their motives and goals may diverge in content from that of the general public.
In the early days of political science research into the impact of emotion on leaders, prominent scholars such as Harold Lasswell (1930, 1948) held that emotions constituted an intrinsic aspect of each leader’s personality. Lasswell argued that a leader’s personal motives and conflicts found expression on the international stage, as each person unconsciously projected their personality and drives onto the larger world. His ideas set the stage for the methodology of case studies, particularly individual psychobiographies, which came to dominate the study of elite decision making in its early years. Much of this work was greatly influenced by the then pervasive appeal of psychoanalytic theory. Many scholars adopted such an approach to analyze the impact of emotional and personality factors in elites on political outcomes of interest.
An additional approach sought to categorize leaders in terms of various pathologies or disorders that might hinder their ability to act rationally. Such perspectives offered insight into the way in which specific personality disorders, or other character flaws, such as narcissism (Steinberg, 1996) or paranoia (Robins & Post, 1997), might systematically effect leader decision making. For example, in Steinberg’s intriguing analysis of three American presidents’ conduct in the Vietnam War, she discusses the impact of malignant narcissism on Nixon’s tendency to respond to threats and humiliation with violence and aggression.
The common feature in both these approaches lies in the often implicit assumption that emotion can draw individual leaders off the rational path. Indeed, most political science analyses, even those undertaken by scholars sympathetic to psychological approaches, have tended to equate rational decision making with optimal choice. The belief here is that emotion can only lead people astray, by interfering with their cold and calculating reasoning ability and introducing bias by distorting information or allowing hot motivations to hold sway over more considered judgment and action.
In international relations, the investigation of emotion on leader decision making has typically incorporated one of two views: first, that emotion can safely be ignored, because so many institutional and structural constraints exist as to render its impact trivial at best; and, second, that emotion remains ubiquitous but not influential, and thus can safely be ignored in assessing causality. Either way, the impact of emotion on leader decision making has remained relatively under-theorized in international relations in general, and leader decision making in particular, since the decline of psychoanalytic analyses.
This lacuna in the literature remains unfortunate, and certainly new findings from the domain of cognitive neuroscience offer many opportunities to rectify this paucity. Probably because of the advantage for survival that such processing allowed, the brain privileges emotional information in both speed and authority. Specifically, as the work of Damasio (1994) and others has documented, emotion appears to have a central and inextricable role in so-called rational decision making. Indeed, when individuals have organic brain lesions which prevent the access of emotional responses, they become essentially paralyzed in their ability to make a decision. Further, the actions in which they engage tend to get them into serious trouble in the social realm, costing them jobs and relationships as a result of their inability to associate the recognized cognitive consequences of contemplated behavior with the negative feelings that might follow in the wake of such action. So, rather than deterring people from rational choice, emotions appear to facilitate effective and efficient decision making.
How does such an understanding of emotion change the political analysis of leader decision making? First, an approach which argues for the beneficial impact of emotion on decision making does not deny the reality of leaders’ attempt to manipulate public sentiment through the use of emotionally laden signs, symbols and concepts which have been long associated with important and consensual values in the individual and cultural history of a nation. Second, research increasingly demonstrates that specific emotions trigger distinctive responses. For example, happy people tend toward deductive, creative styles of decision making, which makes them overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes resulting from their choices. On the other hand, sad people favor an inductive, detail-oriented approach, which leads them to be much more pessimistic about the likelihood of positive outcomes following from their choices.
Further, gender can interact with emotion to influence decision making as well. Men tend more toward anger, for example, while women demonstrate more empathy toward others. This propensity holds import for public policy choices because angry people prefer more retributive and punitive sanctions, such as capital punishment, while empathic people appear more supportive of rehabilitation and victim’s rights organizations.
For purposes of elite decision making in international relations, the emotional impact on risk assessment remains a critical consideration. In this context, fear, like sadness, produces pessimistic views of future consequence, while anger creates more optimistic assessments. In addition, individual judgments of risk appear related to their estimates of benefit, such that people who support a particular policy, like a war, also expect the risk to be low and the benefits high, while the reverse is likely to be true for those who oppose the policy. Note that such judgments are not necessarily logically linked, but they nonetheless remain psychologically connected. In fact, how a leader feels about a particular object or person will affect the relative degree of risk assumed to be associated with it, regardless of the objective logical connection. And such assessments can provide a foundation for subsequent political action.
Rose McDermott is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
REFERENCES
D’Amasio, Antonio. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam.
Lasswell, Harold. 1930. Psychopathology and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lasswell, Harold. 1948. Power and Personality. New York: Norton.
Marcus, George. 2000. “Emotion in Politics.” Annual Review of Political Science 3: 221-50.
Robins, Robert & Post, Jerrold. 1997. Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Steinberg, Blema. 1996. Shame and Humiliation: Presidential Decision Making on
Vietnam. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
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