Good Judgment in International Politics: Three Psychological Perspectives

Abstract

This article explores three distinct psychological perspectives on good judgment in international politics. Advocates of one perspective (skeptics) argue that good judgment is extremely rare. The international political scene is so unpredictable that most people are inevitably wrong most of the time. Moreover, the skeptics argue that when prognosticators are right, their hits are largely the product of either luck or prudent use of probability theory. Advocates of the second perspective (complexifiers) argue that good judgment is closely linked to the ability to transcend common cognitive biases and errors that vitiate most intuitive predictions. Prognosticators who think in self-critical and integratively complex ways are less likely to accept facile historical analogies, to jump to conclusions from fragmentary evidence, to persevere with first impressions despite contradictory evidence, and to fall prey to overconfidence and certainty-of-hindsight effects. Advocates of the third perspective (simplifiers or fundamentalists) argue that good judgment is closely linked to the ability to focus on a few basic processes (rational responses to economic, technological, and geopolitical trends) and to ignore short-term distractions. Drawing on the results of a preliminary study of experts' forecasts in three policy domains (the future of AmericanSoviet relations and of the Soviet Union itself, South Africa, and the Gulf crisis), I argue that each perspective has components of validity and that the research challenge is to identify the conditions under which each is most useful.