
Contents
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Introduction: The State of the Art Introduction: The State of the Art
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Essence of The Decision Essence of The Decision
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Innovations within FPA Decision-Making Research Innovations within FPA Decision-Making Research
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An Area for Further Research: Somatic Markers An Area for Further Research: Somatic Markers
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Conclusions Conclusions
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Notes Notes
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References References
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19 Decision-Making Approaches and Foreign Policy
Get accessDavid Patrick Houghton is retired Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island and Associate at LSE IDEAS, London School of Economics and Political Science. He is a specialist in decision-making and US foreign policy. He has published numerous books and articles in these areas, such as The Decision Point (Oxford University Press, 2012), and has taught at a number of other universities in Britain and the United States.
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Published:22 February 2024
Cite
Abstract
Human beings, as the psychologist Dan Ariely has noted, are ‘predictably irrational’; they use the same kind of cognitive short cuts over and over again, rather than in any sense living up to the high (and ‘reliably artificial’) standards of comprehensive rationality (Ariely 2009). Employing the latter, moreover, is atypical for human beings, since we more often utilize the fast-moving System I than we do the slow-moving System II (Kahneman 2012). Under the influence of what has become known as Behavioural Economics, that wider discipline has increasingly abandoned claims about comprehensive rationality. But we still know rather less than we should about the act of decision-making itself. Attempting to address this issue, the main section of this chapter reviews recent developments in decision-making as applied to foreign policy analysis, examining what might be called ‘the state of the art’ in that field. But gaps remain in the work so far conducted. The second part of this chapter, then looks in particular at how we might build on existing work, suggesting some ways in which we have so far failed to capitalize on research which is arguably of strong relevance to foreign policy scholars.
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