ABSTRACT
Abstract As the Ukrainian crisis of 2014 unfolded, the chancellor of Germany – after speaking with the president of Russia – reported that she thought he was in a completely different world. His view of what was going on was so different than the conventional wisdom in the West that fi nding any common ground seemed nearly impossible. This chapter explores the roots of the different world views that adversaries are oftentimes operating with. It begins by laying out a rational baseline and then identifi es three things that complicate the decisional process at the international level: 1) the need to add substantive context to key concepts, 2) imperfect signaling, and 3) propaganda. I then turn to the shortcuts people employ to manage the fl ow of information coming to them. This discussion of cognitive perspectives concentrates on attribution biases, in weighing graphic information and letting analogues and schemata do too much of the work when constructing mental pictures. Finally, I turn to a theory of motivated reasoning. It argues that an important source of the mental pictures being constructed are the sentiments felt by the observers. These emanate from within the observers more so than from the information coming to them from the outside. This theory of images contends that to avoid painful trade-offs, leaders and followers alike are motivated to adopt stereotypic images that relax what would otherwise be moral prohibitions. Doing this makes deciding easier but makes confl ict resolution more diffi cult. It also drives a process of decision-making at the international level that is different than expected in rational models.
