ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the characteristics of cognitive processes—reasoning, thinking, memory, information search, and processing—in explaining how political leaders make important international policy decisions. It describes some of the cognitive and noncognitive tendencies that are thought to degrade the quality of decision making. The list of cognitive variables that have been alluded to in the context is long. Some of the more frequently cited ones are: heuristics and biases; simple information processing; symptoms of defective decision making; and minimization of effort. Decision making is affected by nonrational, endogenous factors and by many exogenous ones, as well as by multiple goals. One criticism of decision analysis is that the transfer of data from artificial and highly structured research situations to the world of international politics is a dubious enterprise. Decisions frequently have consequences other than their impact on the proximate problem.
