Selective Attention Thesis Research Articles

Knowing the Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence, and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations

This book examines one of the most important subjects in the study of international security: how leaders tend to assess the long-run intentions of adversaries. Keren Yarhi-Milo develops and tests a novel framework for explaining this process, which she labels the “selective attention thesis.” The argument combines core insights from psychological and organizational theories of perception. To Yarhi-Milo, political leaders and members of intelligence organizations will tend to privilege very different factors in their efforts to anticipate others' international objectives. Yarhi-Milo asserts that political leaders will tend to rely on two types of information in the intention-assessment process: information that is particularly vivid (created most prominently from private, face-to-face interactions with other leaders) and information that supports elites' preconceived notions about the nature of the adversary (the most important preconception is whether leaders possess hardline or more accommodating views of rivals). Members of intelligence communities, in contrast, will tend to pay attention to more objective factors in assessing rivals' international intentions. To these individuals, organizational context is the key determinant in judging objectives. Because the preeminent goal of intelligence agencies is to prevent a surprise attack, the surest way of realizing this organizational objective is to concentrate on adversaries' military capabilities and what they can do in assessing what they will do.

In the Eye of the Beholder: How Leaders and Intelligence Communities Assess the Intentions of Adversaries

How do policymakers infer the long-term political intentions of their states' adversaries? A new approach to answering this question, the “selective attention thesis,” posits that individual perceptual biases and organizational interests and practices influence which types of indicators a state's political leaders and its intelligence community regard as credible signals of an adversary's intentions. Policymakers often base their interpretations on their own theories, expectations, and needs, sometimes ignoring costly signals and paying more attention to information that, though less costly, is more vivid (i.e., personalized and emotionally involving). In contrast, intelligence organizations typically prioritize the collection and analysis of data on the adversary's military inventory. Over time, these organizations develop substantial knowledge on these material indicators that they then use to make predictions about an adversary's intentions. An examination of three cases based on 30,000 archival documents and intelligence reports shows strong support for the selective attention thesis and mixed support for two other approaches in international relations theory aimed at understanding how observers are likely to infer adversaries' political intentions: the behavior thesis and the capabilities thesis. The three cases are assessments by President Jimmy Carter and officials in his administration of Soviet intentions during the collapse of détente; assessments by President Ronald Reagan and administration officials of Soviet intentions during the end of the Cold War; and British assessments of Nazi Germany before World War II.