Discusses the way leaders deal with risk in making foreign policy decisions

People often follow intuitive principles of decision making, ranging from group loyalty to the belief that nature is benign. But instead of using these principles as rules of thumb, we often treat them as absolutes and ignore the consequences of following them blindly. In Judgment Misguided, Jonathan Baron explores our well-meant and deeply felt personal intuitions about what is right and wrong, and how they affect the public domain. Baron argues that when these intuitions are valued in their own right, rather than as a means to another end, they often prevent us from achieving the results we want. Focusing on cases where our intuitive principles take over public decision making, the book examines some of our most common intuitions and the ways they can be misused. According to Baron, we can avoid these problems by paying more attention to the effects of our decisions. Written in a accessible style, the book is filled with compelling case studies, such as abortion, nuclear power, immigration, and the decline of the Atlantic fishery, among others, which illustrate a range of intuitions and how they impede the public's best interests. Judgment Misguided will be important reading for those involved in public decision making, and researchers and students in psychology and the social sciences, as well as everyone looking for insight into the decisions that affect us all.

In this accessible collection, leading academic economists, psychologists and philosophers apply behavioural economic findings to practical policy concerns.

Zahariadis offers a theory that explains policymaking when "ambiguity" is present—a state in which there are many ways, often irreconcilable, of thinking about an issue. Expanding and extending John Kingdon's influential "multiple streams" model that explains agenda setting, Zahariadis argues that manipulation, the bending of ideas, process, and beliefs to get what you want out of the policy process, is the key to understanding the dynamics of policymaking in conditions of ambiguity. He takes one of the major theories of public policy to the next step in three different ways: he extends it to a different form of government (parliamentary democracies, where Kingdon looked only at what he called the United States's presidential "organized anarchy" form of government); he examines the entire policy formation process, not just agenda setting; and he applies it to foreign as well as domestic policy. This book combines theory with cases to illuminate policymaking in a variety of modern democracies. The cases cover economic policymaking in Britain, France, and Germany, foreign policymaking in Greece, all compared to the U.S. (where the model was first developed), and an innovative computer simulation of the policy process.

This series will include monographs and collections of studies devoted to the investigation and exploration of knowledge, information, and data-processing systems of all kinds, no matter whether human, (other) animal, or machine. Its scope is intended to span the full range of interests from classical problems in the philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology through issues in cognitive psychology and sociobiology (concerning the mental capabilities of other species) to ideas related to artificial intelligence and to computer science. While primary emphasis will be placed upon theoretical, conceptual, and epistemological aspects of these problems and domains, empirical, experimental, and methodological studies will also appear from time to time. Few areas of inquiry have generated as much interest and enthusiasm in recent times as has the discipline known as "evolutionary psychology", but its pretentions and its accomlishments have not always been properly understood. This collection brings together important work in psychology, anthropology, and the philosophy of science that contributes toward that goal, especially by emphasizing the role of natural selection and sexual selection as crucial factors in the evolution of cognitive mechanisms for information processing. The methodological studies that are presented here are bound to enhance appreciation for the scope and limits of this fascinating domain. The editor has produced a fascinating volume that should appeal to a broad and diverse audience.

This book aims at gauging whether the nature of US foreign policy decision-making has changed after the Cold War as radically as a large body of literature seems to suggest, and develops a new framework to interpret presidential decision-making in foreign policy. It locates the study of risk in US foreign policy in a wider intellectual landscape that draws on contemporary debates in historiography, international relations and Presidential studies. Based on developments in the health and environment literature, the book identifies the President as the ultimate risk-manager, demonstrating how a President is called to perform a delicate balancing act between risks on the domestic/political side and risks on the strategic/international side. Every decision represents a ‘risk vs. risk trade-off,’ in which the management of one ‘target risk’ leads to the development ‘countervailing risks.’ The book applies this framework to the study three major crises in US foreign policy: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979, and the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995. Each case-study results from substantial archival research and over twenty interviews with policymakers and academics, including former President Jimmy Carter and former Senator Bob Dole. This book is ideal for postgraduate researchers and academics in US foreign policy, foreign policy decision-making and the US Presidency as well as Departments and Institutes dealing with the study of risk in the social sciences. The case studies will also be of great use to undergraduate students.