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Does the policy process affect the quality of foreign policy decision making? A common theme of these two books is that rationality is too demanding a standard for foreign policy decision making, given lack of information and time constraints. Accordingly, the process by which policymakers search for available information, formulate alternatives, and evaluate them affects what is decided.
In Understanding Foreign Policy Decision Making, Alex Mintz and Karl DeRouen offer a comprehensive survey of psychological, group, domestic, and environmental factors that influence foreign policy decisions. In contrast, the focus of Mark Schafer and Scott Crichlow in Groupthink Versus High-Quality Decision Making in International Relations is limited to group structures and processes, and in particular those identified in Irving Janis's Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions (1972). While Janis's theory has been enormously influential, his book has been criticized for exhibiting circular reasoning, in that Janis knew the outcome of each case and could look for corroborating evidence that groupthink was operating.
Both books adopt procedural rationality as a benchmark for evaluating the decision-making process--meaning a reasonably comprehensive survey of objectives, extensive information search, and systematic comparison of alternatives in terms of costs and benefits. The more difficult issue concerns the definition of a high-quality decision, or, in other words, substantive rationality. Rather than define the term, Schafer and Crichlow asked a panel of experts to rate the outcome of a series of decisions on their contribution to the short-term national interest and effects on international conflict.
According to Mintz and DeRouen, because human beings are incapable of meeting the rational ideal, they exhibit predictable cognitive biases and errors. These include focusing solely on short-term benefits, locking in on one alternative, wishful thinking, relying on past experience, focusing on a narrow range of policy options, groupthink, overconfidence, ignoring critical information, and focusing on only part of the decision. These biases are, for the most part, taken from the applied decision-making literature, rather than from cognitive psychology. There is no mention, for example, of the availability and representativeness heuristics that are central to the judgment and decision-making literature in psychology. (For a seminal work, see Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, eds., Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and...