ABSTRACT
While the cybersecurity literature over the past decade emphasized system-level determinants of state behavior in cyberspace, recent interest in micro-level attributes resulted in significant contributions to this field. In recent years, the function of cognitive heuristics in decision-making and its consequences offer crucial insight regarding state behavior in cyberspace that current approaches have, thus far, not provided. Consequently, this chapter contributes to this “behavioral turn” by presenting the results of pseudo-experimental wargames involving foreign policy elites from Taiwan, the Philippines, and the United States. Through these war games, we observe the value of distinct cross-national perspectives in explaining variation in outcomes across participants. Despite the broad similarities among the participants involved, it is clear that cultural, procedural, and political expectations unique to each national context shape preferences and corresponding actions. As a result, we argue for the existence of distinct approaches to cybersecurity which may or may not reflect prevailing strategic realities but are, instead, rooted in preexisting beliefs among decision-makers.
