Overview
- Provides an updated picture of the role of cognitive-psychological approaches
- Contributes considerably to the current debates on foreign policy decision-making
- Points out the achievements and promises of psychological approaches
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology (PSPP)
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book focuses on foreign policy decision-making from the viewpoint of psychology. Psychology is always present in human decision-making, constituted by its structural determinants but also playing its own agency-level constitutive and causal roles, and therefore it should be taken into account in any analysis of foreign policy decisions. The book analyses a wide variety of prominent psychological approaches, such as bounded rationality, prospect theory, belief systems, cognitive biases, emotions, personality theories and trust to the study of foreign policy, identifying their achievements and added value as well as their limitations from a comparative perspective. Understanding how leaders in world politics act requires us to consider recent advances in neuroscience, psychology and behavioral economics. As a whole, the book aims at better integrating various psychological theories into the study of international relations and foreign policy analysis, as partial explanations themselves but also as facets of more comprehensive theories. It also discusses practical lessons that the psychological approaches offer since ignoring psychology can be costly: decision-makers need to be able reflect on their own decision-making process as well as the perspectives of the others. Paying attention to the psychological factors in international relations is necessary for better understanding the microfoundations upon which such agency is based.
Reviews
“This book is an important contribution to the literature on the psychology of foreign policy. Every chapter has several case studies emphasizing the relevance to real-world international affairs. This will be a go-to book for scholars and students alike. Highly recommended!” (Professor Valerie M. Hudson, Texas A&M University, USA)
Authors and Affiliations
About the authors
Christer Pursiainen is Professor of Societal Security at the Arctic University of Norway (UiT) in Tromsø, Norway.
Tuomas Forsberg is Director of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki and Professor of International Relations at Tampere University, Finland.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Psychology of Foreign Policy
Authors: Christer Pursiainen, Tuomas Forsberg
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79887-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Political Science and International Studies, Political Science and International Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-79886-4Published: 17 October 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-79889-5Published: 18 October 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-79887-1Published: 16 October 2021
Series ISSN: 2946-2592
Series E-ISSN: 2946-2606
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 391
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations, 8 illustrations in colour
Topics: International Relations, Foreign Policy, Emotion