Emotion and Strategic Learning in War

Abstract

This paper applies the framework of affective intelligence theory—a theory of how emotions affect attitudes, beliefs, and decision making—to elite learning during war time. Doing so provides novel hypotheses about when and how war leaders respond to new events. These hypotheses are tested using a set of cases drawn from the Winter War. Findings suggest that these emotion-derived hypotheses may be more effective in predicting learning and its absence than purely Bayesian or extant cognitive models of learning.