The Cognitive Revolution and the Political Psychology of Elite Decision Making

Experimental evidence in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics is transforming the way political science scholars think about how humans make decisions in areas of high complexity, uncertainty, and risk. Nearly all those studies utilize convenience samples of university students, but in the real world political elites actually makemost pivotal political decisions such as threatening war or changing the course of economic policy.Highly experienced elites aremore likely to exhibit the attributes of rational decision-making; and over the last fifteen years a wealth of studies suggest that such elites are likely to be more skilled in strategic bargaining than samples with less germane experience. However, elites are also more likely to suffer overconfidence, which degrades decision-making skills.We illustrate implications for political science with a case study of crisis bargaining between the US andNorth Korea. Variations in the experience of US elite decision-makers between 2002 and 2006 plausibly explain the large shift in US crisis sig-naling better than other rival hypotheses such as “Iraq fatigue. ” Beyond crisis bargaining othermajor political science theoriesmight benefit from attention to the attributes of individual decision-makers. F or decades, a cognitive revolution has been sweepingacross the many fields of social science. The keyinsight from this revolution is that human decision-making is far from perfectly rational yet follows certain patterns that are relevant for economic and political behav-ior. Most of the evidence about human behavior has come from experimental studies on students and other subject