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Most high-profile disasters are followed by demands for an investigation into what went wrong. Even before they start, calls for finding the missed warning signs and an explanation for why people did not "connect the dots" will be common. Unfortunately, however, the same combination of political pressures and the failure to adopt good social science methods that contributed to the initial failure usually lead to postmortems that are badly flawed. The high stakes mean that powerful actors will have strong incentives to see that certain conclusions are-and are not-drawn. Most postmortems also are marred by strong psychological biases, especially the assumption that incorrect inferences must have been the product of wrong ways of thinking, premature cognitive closure, the naive use of hindsight, and the neglect of the comparative method. Given this experience, I predict that the forthcoming inquiries into the January 6, 2021, storming of the US Capitol and the abrupt end to the Afghan government will stumble in many ways.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- PART I. Political Psychology -- 1. Understanding Beliefs -- 2. The Drunkard's Search -- PART II. Heuristics and Biases -- 3. Representativeness, Foreign Policy Judgments, and Theory‑Driven Perceptions -- 4. Prospect Theory: The Political Implications of Loss Aversion -- PART III. Political Psychology and International Relations Theory -- 5. Signaling and Perception: Projecting Images and Drawing Inferences -- 6. Political Psychology Research and Theory: Bridges and Barriers -- 7. Why Intelligence and Policymakers Clash -- 8. Identity and the Cold War -- PART IV. Psychology and National Security -- 9. Deterrence and Perception -- 10. Psychology and Crisis Stability -- 11. Domino Beliefs -- 12. Perception, Misperception, and the End of the Cold War -- Index

Machine generated contents note: pt. I The Setting -- ch. One Perception and the Level of Analysis Problem -- Do Perceptions Matter? -- The International Environment -- Compulsion in Extreme Circumstances? -- Domestic Determinants -- The Bureaucracy -- Perceptions, Reality, and a Two-Step Model -- ch. Two External Stimuli, Internal Processes, and Intentions -- Introduction -- External versus Internal Sources of Behavior -- Intentions -- Inaccurate Predictions about One's Own Behavior -- ch. Three Deterrence, the Spiral Model, and Intentions of the Adversary -- Two Views of International Relations and the Cold War -- Deterrence -- The Spiral Model -- Psychological Dynamics -- Self-Fulfilling Prophecies and Problems with Incrementalism -- Self-Defeating Power -- Prescriptions -- Universal Generalizations? -- Evidence against the Spiral Model -- Evidence against Deterrence -- Deterrence and World War II; Spiral Model and World War I --

To say that the world changed drastically on 9/11 has become a truism and even a cliché. But the incontestable fact is that a new era for both the world and US foreign policy began on that infamous day and the ramifications for international politics have been monumental.In this book, one of the leading thinkers in international relations, Robert Jervis, provides us with several snapshots of world politics over the past few years. Jervis brings his acute analysis of international politics to bear on several recent developments that have transformed international politics and American foreign p

Preface and acknowledgements / Demetrios James Caraley -- Introduction / Robert Jervis -- American ways of foreign policy and foreign responses -- The lessons of September 11, Iraq, and the American pendulum / Christopher Hemmer -- From the "red juggernaut" to Iraqi WMD: threat inflation and how it succeeds in the United States / Jeffrey M. Cavanaugh -- The rise of a European defense / Seth G. Jones -- The neoconservative heritage and its flaws -- "The civilization of clashes": misapplying the democratic peace in the Middle East / Piki Ish-shalom -- Credibility and the war on terror / Christopher J. Fettweis -- Human rights and civil liberties -- U.S. human rights policy in the post-Cold War era / John W. Dietrich -- The rhetoric of genocide in U.S. foreign policy: Rwanda and Darfur compared / Eric A. Heinze -- Tragic choices in the war on terrorism: should we try to regulate and control torture? / Jerome Slater

To say that the world changed drastically on 9/11 has become a truism and even a cliché. But the incontestable fact is that a new era for both the world and US foreign policy began on that infamous day and the ramifications for international politics have been monumental.In this book, one of the leading thinkers in international relations, Robert Jervis, provides us with several snapshots of world politics over the past few years. Jervis brings his acute analysis of international politics to bear on several recent developments that have transformed international politics and American f.

Based on more than three decades of observation, Robert Jervis concludes in this provocative book that the very foundations of many social science theories--especially those in political science--are faulty. Taking insights from complexity theory as his point of departure, the author observes that we live in a world where things are interconnected, where unintended consequences of our actions are unavoidable and unpredictable, and where the total effect of behavior is not equal to the sum of individual actions. Jervis draws on a wide range of human endeavors to illustrate the nature of thes

Based on more than three decades of observation, Robert Jervis concludes in this book that the very foundation of many social science theories - especially those in political science - are faulty. Taking insights from complexity theory as his point of departure, the author observes that we live in a world where things are interconnected, where unintended consequences of our actions are unavoidable and unpredictable, and where the total effect of behavior is not equal to the sum of individual actions. Jervis draws on a wide range of human endeavors to illustrate the nature of these system effects. He shows how increasing airport security might actually cost lives, not save them, and how removing dead trees (ostensibly to give living trees more room) may damage the health of an entire forest.