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The Negativity Bias in International Politics Swarthmore College Works Political Science Faculty Works Political Science Winter 2019 Bad World: The Negativity Bias In International Politics D. D. P. Johnson Dominic Tierney Swarthmore College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-poli-sci Part of the Political Science Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits ouy Recommended Citation D. D. P. Johnson and Dominic Tierney. (2019). "Bad World: The Negativity Bias In International Politics". International Security. Volume 43, Issue 3. 96-140. DOI: 10.1162/isec_a_00336 https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-poli-sci/689 This work is brought to you for free by Swarthmore College Libraries' Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in Political Science Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Bad World Bad World Dominic D.P. Johnson and The Negativity Bias in International Dominic Tierney Politics In the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the George W. Bush administration ªxated on the perceived threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and Saddam Hussein’s links to international terrorism.1 After the overthrow of the Baathist regime, when the U.S. military position deteriorated, President Bush was extremely reluctant to accept a loss and instead pursued an escalatory strategy known as the “surge” by committing tens of thousands of additional troops. Following the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq in 2011, the intervention was widely remembered as a costly failure, and the desire to avoid a repeat experience became a major source of learning, leading to, for ex- ample, the Obama doctrine.2 Strikingly, as the Iraq War evolved from prospec- tive operation, to current endeavor, to past adventure, bad information always loomed large. Leaders inºated the threat posed by Iraq, escalated the inter- vention rather than accept a loss, and then resolved never to repeat the same mistake. The example of Iraq reºects a wider puzzle in international relations in which negative phenomena have stronger effects on judgment and decision- making than do positive phenomena. Here, “negative phenomena” refers to information, events, or beliefs with the potential to cause undesirable or bad outcomes (e.g., encountering threats, losing resources, suffering military de- Dominic D.P. Johnson is the Alastair Buchan Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford. Dominic Tierney is an associate professor of political science at Swarthmore College, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. The authors thank Bree Bang-Jensen, Roy Baumeister, Richard Betts, Mathias Frendem, John Hibbing, Jonathan Mercer, Tonya Putnam, John Tierney, Marc Trachtenberg, Benjamin Valentino, and William Wohlforth for valuable feedback, as well as participants in research seminars at Columbia University, Dartmouth College, the University of Oxford, and the University of Wash- ington. The authors are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for exceptionally helpful comments. 1. David A. Lake, “Two Cheers for Bargaining Theory: Assessing Rationalist Explanations of the Iraq War,” International Security, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Winter 2010/11), pp. 7–52, at p. 9, doi.org/10.1162/ ISEC_a_00029. See also Chaim Kaufmann, “Threat Inºation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas: The Selling of the Iraq War,” International Security, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Summer 2004), pp. 5–48, doi.org/10.1162/0162288041762940. 2. Dominic Tierney, “The Obama Doctrine and the Lessons of Iraq,” FPRI E-Note (Philadelphia: Foreign Policy Research Institute, May 27, 2012), http://www.fpri.org/article/2012/05/the- obama-doctrine-and-the-lessons-of-iraq/. International Security, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Winter 2018/19), pp. 96–140, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00336 © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 96 Bad World 97 feats, or gaining enemies). “Positive phenomena” refers to factors with the po- tential to cause desirable or good outcomes (e.g., encountering opportunities, accumulating wealth, achieving military victories, or gaining allies). Put sim- ply, bad news consistently exerts a more powerful inºuence on thinking and behavior than does good news. For example, states focus on threats more than on opportunities, dwell on losses more than on gains, and learn more from past failures than from successes. Why would positive and negative events have an asymmetric inºuence on perception and behavior? After all, from a rationalist perspective, both good information and bad information are important in weighing the costs and beneªts of different courses of action. A compelling explanation of their asym- metric inºuence lies in the “negativity bias.” Psychologists have discovered a fundamental principle of human cognition, in which negative factors have a greater impact than positive factors across a wide range of psychological phe- nomena, including motivation, emotion, information processing, decision- making, learning, and memory. Crucially, this is not a strategy that people choose to maximize utility. Instead, the negativity bias is a subconscious pre- disposition that humans exhibit whether or not they are aware of it.3 This argument is important for three reasons. First, the negativity bias helps explain many critical behaviors in international relations, including the secu- rity dilemma, threat inºation, the outbreak and persistence of war, loss aver- sion, the neglect of opportunities for cooperation, and the prominence of failure in institutional memory and learning. Second, the negativity bias appears to challenge the role of other well- known positive biases that act in the opposite direction, such as over- conªdence. This apparent contradiction can be explained by the fact that positive and negative dispositions apply in different contexts. People privilege negative information about the external environment and other actors, but positive information about themselves. The coexistence of these biases can raise the odds of conºict. Decisionmakers simultaneously exaggerate the se- verity of threats and exhibit overconªdence about their capacity to deal with those perils—a potential recipe for disaster. Third, the psychology literature can appear to include examples of every conceivable bias, potentially steering people’s thoughts and behavior in dif- 3. For two landmark reviews of the negativity bias, see Roy F. Baumeister et al., “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” Review of General Psychology, Vol. 5, No. 4 (December 2001), pp. 323–370, doi.org/ 10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323; and Paul Rozin and Edward B. Royzman, “Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion,” Personality and Social Psychology Review, Vol. 5, No. 4 (November 2001), pp. 296–320, doi.org/10.1207/S15327957PSPR0504_2. International Security 43:3 98 ferent directions and compromising predictive power. The negativity bias, however, combines many disparate psychological phenomena into a single meta-bias—a fundamental disposition in the way humans think—allowing stronger predictions about how states are likely to behave in a given context. Despite this importance, the negativity bias has received virtually no atten- tion in international relations. Scholars have long studied the impact of loss aversion, but this is just one example of a much broader phenomenon where negative factors dominate.4 The negativity bias has signiªcant implications for international relations the- ory. For example, the negativity bias supports several features of realist theory by helping explain why states fear each other even when information favoring accommodation is present. However, the causal mechanism—psychological bias—differs from the traditional realist focus on the anarchic international system. Meanwhile, constructivists suggest that anarchy is “what states make of it,” but the negativity bias implies that the construction of international rela- tions is bounded rather than limitless. It would be difªcult or impossible to construct a world where positive factors are consistently more salient than negative factors.5 There are also implications for policymakers. The negativity bias can en- courage threat inºation, risky gambles in the face of loss, and skewed learning from history. Although scholars can counsel leaders to be aware of these perni- cious effects, it is difªcult for individuals to ward off subconscious psy- chological biases, especially meta-biases such as the negativity bias that are driven by numerous reinforcing components. Instead, policymakers must cre- ate decisionmaking structures and routines that block the dangerous effects of misperceptions. The article is divided into seven sections. The ªrst section introduces the psychological principle that “bad is stronger than good.” The second, third, and fourth sections assess key domains in international relations where nega- tive phenomena predominate over positive phenomena, show how the negativity bias provides an explanation, and identify observable implications. The ªfth section considers sources of variation—factors that strengthen or 4. Some work suggests that the negativity bias plays a role in political ideology and domestic poli- tics, but the implications for international relations and global conºict remain largely unexplored. John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith, and John R. Alford, “Differences in Negativity Bias Underlie Variations in Political
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