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Abstract
Racism systematically distorts policymakers' analyses of their allies' and adversaries' capabilities, interests, and resolve, potentially leading to costly choices regarding war and peace. When policymakers hold racist beliefs, as they did in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), their beliefs influence how they explain and predict their allies' and adversaries' behaviors. Reliance on racist stereotypes leads policymakers to inaccurate assessments. An analysis of the relationship between stereotypes, reputations, and bigotry indicates that reputations easily become stereotypes—which is discomforting to anyone who bases policy decisions on another's reputation or encourages policymakers to do so. International security scholars have largely overlooked the role of racism, assuming rational choices on the part of policymakers. Research demonstrates that this assumption is wrong.

Policymakers and international relations scholars concur that prestige is critical to world politics because states having prestige enjoy greater authority. An examination of how policymakers assess their and other states' prestige, however, reveals that this traditional view of prestige is wrong, for two reasons. First, policymakers do not analyze their own states' prestige, because they feel they already know it. They use their feelings of pride and shame as evidence of their state's prestige. Second, political and psychological incentives encourage policymakers to explain another state's behavior in ways that make it unlikely that states gain prestige. Policymakers systematically discount the prestige of other states; a belief that their state has earned the respect and admiration of others is therefore illusory. Consequently, the justification for costly prestige policies collapses. In other words, states should not chase what they cannot catch. Evidence from the South African War supports this conclusion.

Can one use emotion at anything other than the individual level of analysis? Emotion happens in biological bodies, not in the space between them, and this implies that group emotion is nothing but a collection of individuals experiencing the same emotion. This article contends that group-level emotion is powerful, pervasive, and irreducible to individuals. People do not merely associate with groups (or states), they can become those groups through shared culture, interaction, contagion, and common group interest. Bodies produce emotion that identities experience: group-level emotion can be stronger than, and different from, emotion experienced as an individual; group members share, validate, and police each others' feelings; and these feelings structure relations within and between groups in international politics. Emotion goes with identity.

AbstractWhat makes a diplomatic or military signal credible? In strategic settings where deception is possible, rational actors' interpretations rely on their beliefs, intuition, and imagination—they rely on emotion. Two properties of emotion—as an assimilation mechanism and its use as evidence—are key to addressing four strategic problems. First, emotion explains why actors worry needlessly about their reputations. Second, emotion is important to understanding costly signals. Third, emotion explains radical changes in preferences. Fourth, emotion sharpens understanding of strategic problems without being self-invalidating: common knowledge of emotion's effects do not always change those effects. Understanding how rational actors think requires turning to emotion. Evidence from the Korean War captures strengths and weaknesses of competing perspectives.

AbstractA belief in alien abduction is an emotional belief, but so is a belief that Iran intends to build nuclear weapons, that one's country is good, that a sales tax is unjust, or that French decision makers are irresolute. Revolutionary research in the brain sciences has overturned conventional views of the relationship between emotion, rationality, and beliefs. Because rationality depends on emotion, and because cognition and emotion are nearly indistinguishable in the brain, one can view emotion as constituting and strengthening beliefs such as trust, nationalism, justice or credibility. For example, a belief that another's commitment is credible depends on one's selection (and interpretation) of evidence and one's assessment of risk, both of which rely on emotion. Observing that emotion and cognition co-produce beliefs has policy implications: how one fights terrorism changes if one views credibility as an emotional belief.

"Psychology and Security" published on by Oxford University Press.