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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY
The Psychology
of Foreign Policy
Christer Pursiainen
Tuomas Forsberg
Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology
Series Editors
Paul Nesbitt-Larking, Huron College, University of Western Ontario,
London, Canada
Catarina Kinnvall, Department of Political Science, Lund University,
Lund, Sweden
Tereza Capelos, Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security,
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
Henk Dekker, Leiden University, Professor Emeritus of Political Science,
Leiden, The Netherlands
The Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology book series profiles a range
of innovative contributions that investigate the leading political issues
and perspectives of our time. The academic field of political psychology
has been developing for almost fifty years and is now a well-established
subfield of enquiry in the North American academy. In the context of new
global forces of political challenge and change as well as rapidly evolving
political practices and political identities, Palgrave Studies in Polit-
ical Psychology builds upon the North American foundations through
profiling studies from Europe and the broader global context. From
a theoretical perspective, the series incorporates constructionist, histor-
ical, (post)structuralist, and postcolonial analyses. Methodologically, the
series is open to a range of approaches to political psychology. Psycho-
analytic approaches, critical social psychology, critical discourse analysis,
Social Identity Theory, rhetorical analysis, social representations, and a
range of quantitative and qualitative methodologies exemplify the range of
approaches to the empirical world welcomed in the series. The series inte-
grates approaches to political psychology that address matters of urgency
and concern from a global perspective, including theories and perspec-
tives on world politics and a range of international issues: the rise of
social protest movements for democratic change, notably in the global
South and the Middle East; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its broader
implications; patterns of global migration and associated challenges of
integration and religious accommodation; the formation and deforma-
tion of political, economic, and strategic transnational entities such as the
European Union; conflicts and violence resulting from local and regional
nationalisms; emerging political movements of the new left and the new
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To submit a proposal, please contact Senior Editor Ambra Finotello
ambra.finotello@palgrave.com.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14600
Christer Pursiainen · Tuomas Forsberg
The Psychology
of Foreign Policy
Christer Pursiainen Tuomas Forsberg
Department of Technology Helsinki Collegium for Advanced
and Safety Studies
UiT The Arctic University of Norway University of Helsinki
Tromsø, Norway Helsinki, Finland
Tampere University
Tampere, Finland
Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology

ISBN 978-3-030-79886-4 ISBN 978-3-030-79887-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79887-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
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The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface and Acknowledgements
This book focuses on the role of psychological theories in Interna-

tional Relations (IR) and its subfield Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), with
a particular emphasis on decision-making. From time to time, every
academic field requires comprehensive reappraisal to gain a clearer under-
standing of the state of the art, and to further its development. We consid-
ered that a thoroughly researched, critical and updated analysis of the
current field would not be out of place at the present time.
Our fervent wish is to make a meaningful contribution to the debates
on our subject. The book paints a detailed picture of its subject area,
making a holistic, structured and comparative case for the significance of
psychological factors in the study and practice of foreign policy decision-
making. We will highlight the achievements and potential of the diversity
of psychological theories, as well as identify their challenges and limita-
tions. While being pluralistic in its theoretical and methodological spirit,
the book introduces well-justified alternative angles to explore the roots,
processes, and outcomes of foreign policy decision-making.
We envisage that the audience for the book will comprise scholars
and students of IR, FPA, political psychology, and beyond. For those
already specialized in psychological theories with a view to understanding
or explaining foreign policies, the book aspires to become a source of
inspiration and critical thinking both now and in the future. The content
also contributes to more general IR debates about such issues as levels
of analysis, agent–structure relations, cause and effect, rationality, and
v
vi PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
the reliability and validity of research methodology and data-gathering,

among many other topics.
We maintain that psychology is ever-present in any decision-making
and should be taken into account in efforts to explain or understand
foreign policy. This is not a ground-breaking claim as such, and is more
akin to common sense. Yet we argue that this notion is not duly reflected
in the mainstream study of international politics. In our discussions with
our colleagues, our aim has sometimes been referred to as a call to ‘take
agency seriously’. We hope to take some steps towards that goal.
Our comparative look at the array of psychological theories that are
applicable to foreign policy studies shows that the research field itself is far
from monolithic. It is in essence a diverse collection of approaches based
on widely different ontological, epistemological and axiological assump-
tions, as well as methodological solutions and practices. This obviously
presents a challenge to the efforts to integrate such a complex and inco-
herent field more closely into IR. Given the breadth of the theme in
general, we inevitably pose more immediate questions and problems than
we provide definitive answers and solutions. Yet the book seeks to identify
the key challenges of the subject and provide some promising directions
for addressing them.
The IR/FPA literature is rooted in research and theoretical constructs
born from within the American IR scholarship. For many, this is a
disturbing fact that needs correcting in a globalized world. The current
mainstream of IR is skewed not only in neglecting the growing power of
the non-Western world and various transnational forces, but the Western
dominance is also apparent in the theoretical assumptions and practical
examples. Although we have sought both theories and empirical appli-
cations outside of the dominant Western and particularly Anglo-Saxon
repertoire, we also wanted to account for the origin of the key theoretical
approaches in the field, as well as explore existing research in the main
academic outlets as comprehensively as possible. Our chances of turning
the tide with this book are limited. We acknowledge that this state of
affairs in IR/FPA is changing slowly and can be seen as a bottleneck,
slowing down the progress of research. This bias does not invalidate the
existing achievements, however.
We also realize that practitioners may enquire whether the book
provides any problem-solving guidelines for their concrete foreign policy
decision-making. Can our notions about the psychological dimensions in
foreign policy facilitate and enhance practical decision-making? To this
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
end, the final chapter concludes with some key takeaways for foreign
policy practice. In general, however, the particular relevance of the book
for policymakers can be seen in the degree to which it can raise awareness
of various psychological mechanisms that have influenced, and can influ-
ence, foreign policy decision-making, both in their own countries as well
as abroad. It is quite another question to determine which mechanisms
are effectively at play in a given situation, however. Hence, we are happy
to leave more concrete policy recommendations to policy-planning insti-
tutions and think tanks that are designed for and dedicated to guiding
and assisting practical policy. As both authors have long experience of
working for such think tanks, we do not underestimate such policy analysis
research.
Our task is, however, both more modest and more demanding—
to increase knowledge of international politics and to clarify thinking
about the role of psychology in it. That said, we are well aware of the
incompleteness and uncertainty of any solutions.
We started working on the book at hand in early 2019. The first drafts
of some individual chapters were presented as papers at conferences and
workshops, which provided useful arenas for collegial debate and moti-
vated us to sharpen our focus. These events included the London School
of Economics, Centre for International Studies (LSE CIS) fellow work-
shop in May 2019; the Central and East European International Studies
Association/International Studies Association (CEEISA-ISA) Conference
in Belgrade in June 2019; the 13th Pan-European Conference on Interna-
tional Relations in Sofia in September 2019; and the International Society
of Political Psychology (ISPP) Annual Meeting (Virtual Conference) in
July 2020. To compensate for the absence of physical conferences and
workshops during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020/2021, we also orga-
nized our own series of online discussions between November 2020 and
early 2021. All of these events unravelled many knots in our book and
pointed to new avenues of investigation.
There are a number of people to whom we are indebted for giving
their time, constructive comments and feedback on individual draft chap-
ters or the whole manuscript. We owe a debt of gratitude to Chris
Alden, Hanne Appelqvist, Hiski Haukkala, Valerie M. Hudson, Tuukka
Kaidesoja, Mikael Mattlin, Heikki Patomäki, Kate Seaman, Jaana Simola
and Eric K. Stern for their invaluable comments. Sincere thanks are also
due to Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto and his special adviser
Joel Linnainmäki for their contribution to an online session discussing
viii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
the links between foreign policy theory and practice from a psychological
perspective. Likewise, we are grateful to former Finnish Foreign Minister
Dr. Erkki Tuomioja for an illuminating discussion especially on the role
of interpersonal psychology in foreign policy practice. Tuomas Forsberg
would like to thank colleagues and friends at the Helsinki Collegium for
Advanced Studies and Tampere University for numerous inspiring discus-
sions that have helped to develop arguments also related to the theme
of the book, as well as the Academy of Finland Project ‘Cultural State-
craft in International Relations: The Case of Russia’ (Project no. 298883,
2016–2021) for financial support. Christer Pursiainen would similarly like
to extend thanks to his employer UiT The Arctic University of Norway
for its generous research leave policy, which enabled him to work on this
book in 2019.
We are also grateful to Lynn Nikkanen and Sean Winkler for copy-
editing the manuscript at various stages of its development. Finally, we
would like to thank Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature for publishing
such a lengthy book, and the editors, series editors and anonymous
reviewers for their indispensable contribution.
It goes without saying that any errors, shortcomings, or misinterpre-
tations that not only may, but will, appear in a book as wide-ranging as
ours remain the sole responsibility of the authors.
Tromsø, Norway Christer Pursiainen

Helsinki, Finland Tuomas Forsberg
April 2021
Contents
1 Why Does Psychology Matter in International

Relations? 1
Metatheorizing Psychology in International Relations 2
Explaining and Understanding 2
Levels 5
Agent and Structure 8
International Relations Grand Theories and Psychology 11
Comparing or Combining Theories? 12
What Do Grand Theories Say About Psychology? 14
Psychology as a Causal Factor in Foreign Policy
Decision-Making 18
Foreign Policy Analysis and Psychology 24
Rationality and Psychology 28
Roadmap to the Rest of the Book 32
Bibliography 36
2 The Cognitive Limitations of Rationality 47
Rational Choice 48
The Core and the Variants 49
Rational Choice as a Middle-Range Theory 50
Bounded Rationality 54
A Satisfactory Decision will Suffice 55
How to Enhance Rationality? 59
Poliheuristic Theory 63
ix
x CONTENTS
Two Stages of Decision-Making 63

The Non-Compensatory Principle 64
The Primacy of Domestic Policy 66
Applications 67
Soviet Foreign Policy of New Thinking 68
Multilateral Nuclear Forces for NATO? 69
North Korea: Irrational, Rational or Boundedly
Rational? 71
Going to War for Domestic Reasons 72
Experimenting with Foreign Policy 72
Discussion 74
Rational Choice Model as an Ideal Type 74
Cognition’s Relationship to Rational Choice 76
What Does Bounded Rationality Really Mean? 77
Does Bounded Rationality, or Poliheuristic Theory,
Represent ‘Reality’? 77
How Valid Are These Theories? 79
Conclusion 80
Bibliography 81
3 Prospects of Loss and Gain 89
Prospect Theory 90
Framing the Decision 90
Loss or Gain? 92
Probabilities 93
Experimental Evidence 94
Applications 95
General Relevance to IR/FPA 95
Eagle Claw, an Operation that Went Wrong 97
The North Korean Decision to Go Nuclear 98
Russia’s Invasion of Crimea 99
Discussion 101
From Laboratory to Foreign Policy Reality? 101
Group Dynamics in Risky Decisions? 103
Is Foreign Policy Behavior Average Human Behavior? 104
The Reference-Point Debate 105
Prospect Theory and Strategic Choice 108
Is Prospect Theory Just Another Type
of Rational Choice? 109
CONTENTS xi
Conclusion 110
Bibliography 111
4 Beliefs That Shape Decisions 117
Theorizing Belief Systems 118
What Is a Belief System? 119
Ideologies as Belief Systems 121
Images—And National Characters 125
Cognitive Maps 128
Operational Code 131
Applications 134
The Case of Soviet Ideology 135
Operational Codes of Foreign Policy Leaders 137
Discussion 139
Are Belief Systems Stable—And if Not, What Does That
Mean? 139
What Do Belief System Theories Do? 142
Do Identity and Role Pertain to (Social) Psychology? 144
Can We Trust the Results? 148
Conclusion 149
Bibliography 151
5 Biased Decisions 163
Theorizing Cognitive Biases 164
Why Do We Have Cognitive Biases—Or Are They Biases
at All? 165
Crisis Situations as a Bias Trigger 168
Examples of Biases 172
Applications 185
Confirmation Bias and the End of the Cold War 185
Lessons of Munich 187
The Fiascos of Collective Foreign
Policy Decision-Making 190
Discussion 192
Do Cognitive Biases Matter in Foreign Policy—And if so,
How? 192
The Ambiguity of Groupthink 194
Conclusion 196
Bibliography 197
xii CONTENTS
6 Emotional Decisions 209

Theorizing Emotions 210
What Are Emotions? 211
Basic Emotions 213
Measurement of Emotions 216
Rationality and Emotions 219
The Nature of Emotions in Foreign Policy 221
Applications 224
The Variety of Functions of Emotions in International
Politics 225
The Politics of Fear 227
The Politics of Anger 230
The Politics of Empathy 232
Discussion 233
The Fuzzy Understandings of Emotions 233
From Emotions to Behavior 234
How to Study Emotions in Foreign Policy? 236
Is the Study of Emotions Reliable and Valid? 238
Conclusion 239
Bibliography 241
7 Personality Matters 253
Theorizing Personality 254
Psychohistory 256
The Big Five 259
Can Personality Change Over Time? 262
Applications 264
“When You See It in Practice” 265
The Impact of Childhood Experiences 267
Leadership Traits 271
Gender, Personality and Foreign Policy 274
Brief Profiling of Two Leaders:
Trump and Putin 275
Discussion 282
Is There a Methodology? 282
The Problems of the Big Five 284
Does It Become Too Complicated? 285
Conclusion 286
Bibliography 287
CONTENTS xiii
8 Relations of Trust and Mistrust 299

Theorizing Trust 300
What Is Trust? 301
Calculated Trust 302
The Culture of Trust 303
The Psychology of Trust 304
IR Grand Theories and Strategies of Trust 307
Applications 309
Initiating Trust: Gorbachev and Reagan 310
Developing and Maintaining Trust: Russia and the West 317
Eroding Trust: Putin and the West 320
Discussion 322
What Is Trust Research After All? 323
Empirical Operationalization of Theoretical Trust
Research 323
How to Measure Trust? 325
Conclusion 326
Bibliography 327
9 Psychological Theories from a Comparative Perspective 337
What Are the Underlying Assumptions? 338
Is There a Research Program? 341
How Sound Are the Methodologies? 343
Takeaways for Foreign Policy Practice 346
What Next? 350
Bibliography 353
Annexes 357
Index 377
About the Authors
Dr. Christer Pursiainen is Professor of Societal Security at the Arctic

University of Norway (UiT) in Tromsø, Norway. He obtained a doctorate
in Political Science from the University of Helsinki in 1999. Previously,
he has worked in leading management and research positions in academic
institutions, think tanks and consultancy companies, and intergovern-
mental organizations in Finland, Sweden, Russia and Italy. His publica-
tions deal with a variety of themes such as international relations theory,
foreign policy analysis, regional cooperation and integration, compara-
tive politics, state–society relations, Soviet/Russian history and politics,
societal security, crisis management, and critical infrastructure protection
and resilience, published in different countries and in several languages.
Dr Pursiainen’s books include the authored The Crisis Management
Cycle (Routledge 2017), the edited At the Crossroads of Post-Communist
Modernisation: Russia and China in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave
Macmillan 2012), the co-edited Russia as a Great Power: Dimensions
of Security under Putin (Routledge 2005), and the authored Russian
Foreign Policy and International Relations Theory (Routledge 2000).
Dr. Tuomas Forsberg is Director of the Helsinki Collegium for

Advanced Studies (HCAS) at the University of Helsinki and Professor
of International Relations at Tampere University (on leave of absence
2018–2023). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wales, Aberys-
twyth in 1998. Since then, he has worked as the acting director and a
xv
xvi ABOUT THE AUTHORS
senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs;

as Professor of Western European Security Studies at the George C.
Marshall European Centre for Security Studies, Garmisch-Partenkirchen,
Germany; and as Professor of International Relations at the University of
Helsinki before transferring to the University of Tampere. His publica-
tions include Russia’s Cultural Statecraft (co-edited with Sirke Mäkinen,
Routledge 2022), The European Union and Russia (co-authored with
Hiski Haukkala, Palgrave 2016), Divided West: European Security and
the Transatlantic Relationship (co-authored with Graeme Herd, Black-
well 2006), and articles in journals such as International Affairs, Journal
of Peace Research, Review of International Studies, Europe-Asia Studies,
Security Dialogue, Global Society, and Journal of Common Market Studies,
among others.
List of Figures
Fig. A.1 ‘Bounded rationality’, ‘poliheuristic theory’, and ‘prospect

theory’ in IR literature 359
Fig. A.2 ‘Belief systems’ in IR literature 360
Fig. A.3 ‘Cognitive biases’ in IR literature 361
Fig. A.4 ‘Emotions’ in IR literature 361
Fig. A.5 ‘Personality’ and ‘psychohistory’ in IR literature 362
Fig. A.6 ‘Trust’ in IR literature 363
Fig. A.7 Psychological literature in IR (summary I) 363
Fig. A.8 Psychological literature in IR (summary II) 364
xvii
List of Tables
Table 1.1 Psychology as a causal factor in foreign policy

decision-making 22
Table 3.1 The fourfold pattern of prospect theory 93
Table 4.1 George’s (1969) philosophical and instrumental questions
for an operational code 132
Table 4.2 Holsti’s (1977) six-type matrix of operational codes
with Walker’s (1983) four-type modification 133
Table 7.1 The Big Five 260
Table 8.1 Explanatory factors for trust-building and the respective
theoretical schools 324
xix
CHAPTER 1
Why Does Psychology Matter in International

Relations?
How remiss would it be to claim that international politics, which is

essentially a human affair, has nothing to do with psychology, such issues
as perceptions and misperceptions, beliefs and ideologies, emotions and
personalities? Yet while such factors are a central element in diplomatic
and media reporting on international politics, the main scholarly theories
in this field have largely neglected psychology in their explanations.
This book focuses on foreign policy decision-making from the view-
point of psychology. Foreign policy can concisely be defined as the sum
of official external relations conducted by an independent actor in inter-
national relations (Hill, 2016), with the reservation that the concept is
historically developed and more ambiguous than the above simple state-
ment (Leira, 2019). The book contends that psychology is always present
in human decision-making, constituted by its structural determinants but
also playing its own agency-level constitutive and causal roles, and there-
fore it should be taken into account in any analysis of foreign policy
decisions. Located within the discipline of International Relations (IR)
and its subfield Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), the study is also part
of the research area of political psychology (Houghton, 2015; Huddy
et al., 2013; Nesbitt-Larking et al., 2014), which aims at applying what
is known about human psychology to the study of political behavior.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
C. Pursiainen and T. Forsberg, The Psychology of Foreign Policy,
Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79887-1_1
2 C. PURSIAINEN AND T. FORSBERG
The research remit of the current book is twofold. First, we aim to

present a means of better integrating various psychological theories into
IR, as partial explanations themselves but also as facets of more holistic
understandings. Second, we analyze the most prominent psychological
theories in FPA from a comparative perspective, identifying their achieve-
ments and added value as well as their limitations and shortcomings. In
so doing, we aim to pinpoint some potentially fruitful avenues to explore
in the study of foreign policy decision-making.
Metatheorizing Psychology
in International Relations
In the current book, we will present a number of psychological theo-
ries that can and have been applied to the study of international politics
and foreign policies. Nevertheless, we emphasize that psychology is not
embedded in a specific set of theories only. Nor is it committed to strong
methodological individualism and should not be strictly set apart from
structures. Unpacking, deconstructing, questioning and revising such
assumptions is a critical function of psychological approaches to IR. To
elaborate our approach, it is necessary to provide a concise overview of
some key metatheoretical debates that constitute IR as a discipline, and
explain how we locate psychology and the respective theories within this
more generic framework.
Explaining and Understanding

One of the stereotypical dividing lines in the social sciences runs between
the approaches of explaining and understanding. Explanation is some-
times regarded as a straightforward concept—something either is or is
not an explanation. Understanding then is conceived as a slow process-
like accumulation of knowledge, creating the ability to interpret an event,
or rather a phenomenon, in a deeper sense. A phenomenon can be
explained by simply stating the causes. Understanding is characteristic of
historical study, which usually develops a plausible multifaceted narrative
that can be gradually revised when new evidence emerges. Explanation
thus reflects the positivist image of natural sciences, and understanding
the interpretivist image of the humanities. In this deductive nomolog-
ical scheme, an explanation is a statement of a causal relationship that
affects the behavior of an agent (or actor), ‘from outside’ so to speak.
1 WHY DOES PSYCHOLOGY MATTER IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS? 3
When the researcher discovers an external force that caused the event,
it is taken to count as an explanation. An explanation involves the idea
of a general regularity that determines a cause-and-effect relationship
in certain circumstances. Understanding, on the other hand, looks at
an action or event ‘from within’. The action is seen as resulting from
subjective reasoning. Intuitively, if we apply psychology to analyze foreign
policy decisions, the latter may seem more appropriate. Yet psychology
as a discipline, while it involves understanding psychological capacities
and their functions, is conventionally seen as reflecting the model of
natural sciences in providing causal explanations for human behavior (c.f.
Cummins, 2010; Keil, 2006).
In the above scheme, causal explanation and interpretivist under-
standing are two different forms of scientific activity (von Wright, 1971).
Martin Hollis and Steve Smith (2003, pp. 213–214) famously dissemi-
nated this dichotomy in their 1990 book Explaining and Understanding
International Relations, arguing that “there are always two stories to
tell and they cannot be merely added together.” One story is told from
outside about the human part of the natural world and the other from
inside in a separate social realm. The generation of IR scholars that
studied Hollis and Smith as a key textbook were supposed to make
a clear choice between understanding and explaining. Such a solution
comes at a price. If explanation and understanding were two different
stories, the respective scholars could not really learn from and draw
upon each other because they would represent truly incommensurable
paradigms (see Kuhn, 1970). Two scholars, one representing the explana-
tory paradigm and the other that of understanding, would both be right
in their own way. Researchers would not be able to make a rational choice
with regard to their approach, but it would be the result of socialization
according to the schools, contingent upon the purpose, or simply a matter
of taste rather than argumentation.
A more practical solution to this dilemma is to perceive explanation
and understanding not as incompatible approaches, but as working in
tandem and answering slightly different types of questions. If the study of
social life is question-driven and not methodology-driven, both can have
their place (Wendt, 1991, p. 392). Explanation is better suited to large
patterns and trends, while understanding is needed to make sense of indi-
vidual cases. Following the rather recently popularized idea of analytical
eclecticism or pragmatism in IR (Haas & Haas, 2002; Sil & Katzenstein,
2010), it is possible to combine the two approaches, or at least some of
their explanatory elements, into a more comprehensive problem-solving

account for a specific case.
However, it is also possible to deny the whole juxtaposition of expla-
nation and understanding (see e.g., Manicas, 2006, pp. 12–16). Even
linguistically, explanation and understanding are not separate but related
activities: if I understand something, I can explain it to you, and then
you may understand it as well. More importantly, the distinction between
understanding and explanation on the basis of external causes and internal
reasons is not tenable. It rests on Humean empiricism and the view of
causality as constant conjunctions (Ducasse, 1966; Pallies, 2019). Cause is
an ambivalent concept in studying international relations (Lebow, 2014).
The idea that reasons cannot be causes, because they do not exist inde-
pendently of the action, is largely a semantic question. We may describe
the action’s intentions, but the same action can be redescribed with a
vocabulary that is devoid of intentions, and intentions can exist even
without a resulting action. For this reason, a number of philosophers,
most famously Donald Davidson (2001), have argued that reasons are
causes. According to the standard model that Davidson inspired, reasons
consisting of beliefs and desires are mental states that explain action. As
Heikki Patomäki (1996, p. 122) states, “we always need to involve both
‘understanding’ and ‘explanation’ in our analyses of international rela-
tions” (see also Bieler & Morton, 2000; Carlsnaes, 1992, 1994; Norman,
2021; Wight, 1996, pp. 315ff.).
The difficulty in neatly separating explaining and understanding
becomes quite clear if we look closely at Hollis and Smith’s (2003)
account of causal and interpretative agency. For them, rational choice is
the category of causal agency whereas interpretivist agency is based on
reasoned choices. All the same, if rational choice is the only assumed
mechanism of agency, then all the variation that explains the choices must
be located at the structural level, such as the different choice matrixes
in game theory: “the theory gets its explanatory power from structure-
generated interests and not from actual individual psychology” (Satz &
Ferejohn, 1994, p. 72). If rational choice, however, is not the only
possible mode of human reasoning, then it can be seen as one type of
reasoned choice that needs to be studied ‘from within’.
Yet there remains a crucial difference between reasons and causes, even
if they can be seen as partly synonymous. In English, the difference is that
we can choose reasons but not causes, even if we can manipulate the latter.
If effective reasons are chosen, there is always an aspect of underdetermi-

nation at play. As John Searle (2001, p. 73) notes, psychological causes do
not necessitate the effect if it is voluntary. The antecedent psychological
factors, such as the perceptions and beliefs that underlie reasons, are not
sufficient to automatically cause the action of a free agent. We can have
many reasons and yet choose not to act upon them. Insofar as reasons are
effective reasons, they are causes, but why exactly they are effective in a
given situation may remain a mystery.
We assert that psychological factors can be located on both sides of the
traditional but somewhat fuzzy explaining/understanding divide. As far
as psychology is understood as the allegedly objective personality traits of
agents, a scientific view of human nature or electrical impulses of neurons,
it belongs to the category of explaining. When psychology alludes to the
human mind and to the subjective beliefs and desires of agents, it belongs
to the category of understanding. Yet with regard to many psycholog-
ical factors, the strict distinction between explaining and understanding is
not justifiable. If emotions are regarded as physiological arousals, they are
considered explanations, but if they are seen as appraisals, they require
understanding. However, as in the case of emotions, such external and
internal factors may interact. Seemingly objective personality traits are
conventionally based on subjective reporting, and subjective belief systems
can be shaped by external factors such as political and economic condi-
tions. Similarly, framing the situation and acting in line with, say, prospect
theory, which is one of the semi-rational approaches discussed in this
volume, can be seen as a universal tendency, but it still presupposes a
subjective understanding of the situation.
Levels
The question of the level-of-analysis problem in IR was most famously
raised by David Singer (1961). Singer distinguished between parts and
the whole, micro and macro. He argued that the levels could not be
combined, and that a choice between them was inevitable. Whether it
is a question of the natural or the social sciences, the researcher must
choose to examine either parts or the whole, components or the entire
system. One must choose between flowers and a garden, or an individual
and society, and so on. In IR, the two levels were the nation-state and
its foreign policy and the international system with its structures. Singer’s
premise was pluralistic in one sense: either level of analysis, part or whole,
was justified. Yet the researcher had to choose one and avoid confusing
them when conducting analyses.
Singer did not explicitly consider the fact that entities are themselves
parts of something, and parts are entities in relation to their own parts,
and that, accordingly, we can always distinguish between more than two
levels of analysis. A couple of years before Singer, Kenneth Waltz (2001)
had actually introduced his three levels of analysis, or ‘images’ of what
causes international wars: human nature and behavior; the regime type of
state; or the international system. The latter notion famously led Waltz
(1979) to develop his structural realism, which suggests that wars occur
because there is nothing to prevent them—in a state of international
anarchy. Anarchy in this context refers to a situation where there is no
single global state and no corresponding monopoly of coercive machinery
as there is within states.
In addition to the conventional three levels of analysis—the indi-
vidual, the state, and the international system—a number of other levels
can be considered. James Rosenau (1966, p. 48) distinguished between
individual, role, governmental, societal, and systemic variables. Graham
Allison (1971) introduced models of bureaucratic politics and organiza-
tional foreign policy that can be seen as additional levels of analysis located
between the state and an individual decision-maker. A dyad or a regional
complex can be set up as a level between the state and the international
system (Buzan & Wæver, 2003; Poast, 2016). We can regard transnational
civil societies, connections between multinational companies, or various
cross-border networks as levels of their own, being located between the
individual and the international system. If we probe the individual level,
we can also distinguish multiple levels down the ladder such as neurons.
Or we can add an ecosystem, a biosphere, or a planetary system as a new
level. All in all, it is always possible, or indeed academically fruitful, to
propose new levels or to scrutinize different subsystems within each level
of analysis. Indeed, Nicholas Onuf (1995, p. 37) has noted that there
seemed to be as many levels as researchers agreed there were.
Yet the fundamental question does not concern the number of levels.
The ultimate dilemma is whether the levels should or can be kept analyt-
ically separate, or in which ways they may relate to or even explain each
other (Temby, 2015). In mainstream positivist debates, this issue culmi-
nates in the juxtaposition between reductionism and structuralism. The
former advocates the view that an entity is nothing but the sum of its parts
and their properties. Such an ontology is associated with behaviorism in

the study of international relations. We may say that the international
system is equal to the states of the world and their interrelationships, and
that state behavior can only be understood through the individual agents
that act on behalf of a state. In stark contrast, structuralism represents the
idea that the whole defines the nature of its parts. In essence, the whole
must be seen as something more than just the sum of its parts, and the
parts are constituted by virtue of the whole. The international system is
something more than the states and individuals of which it is composed,
as the qualities of this system cannot be reduced to its individual parts
and their aggregates. When this debate had its heyday in IR in the 1960s
and 1970s, there was no definitive conclusion, at least before the so-called
agent-structure debate entered IR in the late 1980s. Instead, the practical
solution that a taxonomy of levels could be useful not only for organizing
purposes, but also for analysis as each level has something to contribute,
eschewed the principal question of causal hierarchy or importance (e.g.,
Holsti, 1967).
The issue of levels becomes further complicated by similar debates
about causality within the very concept of psychology and the study of
it. Thus, the American Psychological Association (APA, n.d.; cf. Brown,
2007; Colman, 2015; VandenBos, 2007) defines psychology as “the
study of the mind and behavior” or “the supposed collection of behav-
iors, traits, attitudes, and so forth that characterize an individual or a
group.” A somewhat broader avenue is provided by social psychology,
which, according to APA, is the study of “how an individual’s thoughts,
feelings, and actions are affected by the actual, imagined, or symboli-
cally represented presence of other people.” The definition goes further
by distinguishing between psychological social psychology and sociolog-
ical social psychology. “The former tends to put greater emphasis on
internal psychological processes, whereas the latter focuses on factors
that affect social life, such as status, role, and class.” Another promi-
nent related field of study has traditionally been mass psychology, which,
again following APA, deals with phenomena related to “the mental and
emotional states and processes that occur in a large body of individuals,”
such as mass movements or collective hysteria. More recently, scholars
focusing on political psychology have argued that psychology is related
to, and partially constituted by, globalization and other international
phenomena (e.g., Arnett, 2002). Viewed from the other extreme, elim-
inative materialists contend that we understand the human mind best
when reducing it to the study of neurons (e.g., Bickle, 2015; cf. crit-
icism in Fumagalli, 2018; Krakauer et al., 2017). Physicists and others
who follow a similar chain of inference may argue further that quantum
mechanics explains human decision-making (e.g., Wendt, 2015).
In IR/FPA, psychology is habitually associated with state leaders
and is sometimes seen as an attempt to explain social phenomena
exclusively from the angle of the individual. ‘Psychologicalization’ has
a negative connotation, partly because researchers rarely have reliable
evidence of psychological factors in international politics. Even if they
had, the psychological explanations seem to render social or structural
forces irrelevant or secondary. Underlying this view lurks the question of
whether social facts can exist independently of the psychological states
of individuals or whether social forces penetrate individual minds (Leon,
2010).
In this book, we mainly refer to individual or small groups of decision-
makers, and occasionally to political elites as our units of analysis.
FPA traditionally focuses on states and their leaders, but psychological
approaches to decision-making can be flexibly applied to all kinds of
actors. Moreover, explaining foreign policy behavior cannot be reduced to
specific levels representing agency, such as the psychology of an individual,
because all levels are interrelated. The social character of the individual is
constituted by the structural relations of power (Nesbitt-Larking et al.,
2014, p. 426), and social structures in turn are both constitutively and
causally dependent on agents and practices (Wendt, 1999, p. 185). This
notion inevitably leads us to address the agent-structure debate in some
more detail.
Agent and Structure

If both reductionism and structuralism are problematic, we need a third
way that does not allow either parts or the whole to predominate. This is
called a structurationist (or reflexive, relational or evolutionary) approach
in social theory. According to this view, the individual and societal levels
are not only interconnected but mutually constituted. An agent is not
only self-observing and self-correcting, but also socially influential in rela-
tion to the situations in which that agent acts. By its own activities,
the agent can contribute to either maintaining or changing these social
situations and their conditions. On the other hand, the social struc-
tures constrain and enable human agency as well as constitute subjectivity
(Giddens, 1984).
However, if the idea of mutual constitution is taken too far, we face

yet another problem. Margaret Archer (1995) has criticized Anthony
Giddens for his view that agency and structure cannot be decoupled and
has suggested instead that agents, with their own psychological charac-
teristics and structures need to be treated separately and on their own
terms. Just as there are emergent properties at the level of the whole
that cannot be reduced to the properties of the parts, there is also an
autonomy at the level of parts (Wight, 2006). The extent to which the
parts are self-contained is seen as an issue of modularity: should we accept
modularity, we can and should make sense of psychological or social
mechanisms by first treating them as separate components, and then study
how they interact with other components and the larger system to which
they are connected (Kuorikoski, 2012). Such a view would be in line with
‘weak’ methodological individualism, which does not deny the impact of
structural factors (Udehn, 2001, 2002).
Where does this lead us? The structurationist position has become
mainstream in social theory, instead of being a challenger. What is
supposed to follow in terms of empirical research is not always as self-
evident, however. The above-mentioned debate concerning the levels
in IR was to a large extent replaced by the agent-structure discourse,
when the debate permeated IR from sociology and philosophy in the late
1980s (Coleman, 1990; Giddens, 1979, 1984; Searle, 1995). Alexander
Wendt’s (1987) and David Dessler’s (1989) articles were seminal in
deconstructing some key premises of structure in IR theories in general,
and in Waltz’s structural realism in particular. Both advocated the struc-
turationist theory that gave agents and structure equal ontological status.
Structure was seen as a field of action that only exists by virtue of agency
and that could change as a result of it, but agency itself would not be
possible without a structure. If there is no dominant level of causality,
agent and structure constantly interact and define each other. It is an
ongoing process of dialectical adaptation and change that will never end
(see also Qin, 2018; Wendt, 1999).
This view is a rather commonsensical solution that has long been both
explicit and implicit in much historical research on international relations.
It seems intuitively undeniable that our own agency can potentially make
a difference in our society, but simultaneously that the societal structure
also defines the conditions in which we are situated by both enabling
and constraining our actions. Yet this “anarchy is what states make of
it” (Wendt, 1992) idea of structuration in the rather immature disci-

pline of IR challenged the key assumptions of the then popular structural
realism, and other holistic theories that assume an independent power for
structures (e.g., balance of power, accumulation of capital).
As the discussion on the relationship between agency and structure,
if abstracted far enough, moves more at the level of metatheory, it does
not directly answer the question of what those agents and structures are.
The agent can, in principle, be any subject; in foreign policy, it can be
the president, the foreign ministry, the cabinet, the foreign policy elite,
or the state. Yet the extent to which states can be seen as persons having
consciousness is a quite different question (Lerner, 2021; Wendt, 2004).
Although states are sometimes seen metaphorically as persons with legal
and moral responsibilities, and have capacities to act when individuals
act on behalf of them, the anthropomorphic analogy is misleading if
personhood is seen as unitary and corporal. Structure, in turn, is multi-
dimensional, too. It can be understood largely as material, based on
resources and their distribution, but also including rules and norms of
international politics, or perceived identity relationships between self and
others, that constitute the power of the material structures.
If both levels define each other and neither can be given a supe-
rior position in advance, it follows that we need to study both agency
as well as structure from their own vantage points. In principle, this
would be possible to do simultaneously, with several subfactors involved,
if social research were based on identifying quantitative nonlinear func-
tions of many explanatory factors, as in conventional causal dependence
research in engineering. Yet something of this sort was already attempted
in the 1960s and 1970s in FPA, in terms of the efforts to develop an
all-encompassing theory of foreign policy. As at that time, such efforts
today would be unlikely to bring much more to the discipline than a vast
amount of data on different correlative relationships, nonlinear curves and
possible futures. Although sophisticated simulation methods may offer
some opportunities to understand and avoid the worst pitfalls, in prac-
tice it is difficult to examine several moving parts at the same time in
this fundamentally social and psychological sphere called foreign policy.
In a sense, engineering social sciences is doomed to fail, which is precisely
where psychology comes into the equation.
In empirical research, agency and structure are typically separated and
taken in turn as temporarily given in order to be able to study how
one explains the other. At first sight, the idea that structures can be
‘frozen’ or ‘given’ may be seen as conflicting with the basic idea of the
dynamic agent-structure schema. In practice, the idea that social struc-
tures have to be bracketed when conducting situational foreign policy
analysis is, however, not a serious problem. The constitutive structural
determinants, namely such issues as the structure of the international
system and its balance of power, state identities, or domestic political
systems are not likely to change unobtrusively. Therefore, structural-
historical research may require one to take “social structures and agents
in turn as temporarily given in order to examine the explanatory effects
of the other,” especially if both social identity and interests appear to
be relatively stable (Wendt, 1987, pp. 356, 364–365; 1994, p. 386).
Constructivist FPA models (Carlsnaes, 1992, 1994) clearly implicate
this type of research design and sequency, even if the intention were
to continue the analysis of a situation-specific decision with a view to
discussing its intended and unintended effects on the existing structural
conditions.
As we have now deconstructed both the dichotomy of explana-
tion/understanding as well as that of the levels of analysis and agency-
structure, it is no longer possible to locate psychological theories exclu-
sively to any neatly demarcated box. Although the psychological theories
that we examine in this book mainly seek to examine agency ‘from
within’, it has to be taken into account that this agency is always
embedded within, constituted by, and able to potentially affect its struc-
ture.
International Relations Grand

Theories and Psychology
The grand theories of IR, such as realism, constructivism, and liber-
alism, together with post-structuralist and other critical theories, have
constituted the self-image of the discipline from the 1980s onwards.
None of these theories says much about the role of individuals and their
psychology in world politics. Indeed, “IR scholars have seemed not to
know what to do with psychology” (Houghton, 2015, p. 314). However,
to the extent that such theories are not committed to methodological
holism, a causally relevant agency level of psychological factors may not
only be complementary but compulsory to account for the importance of
the structural factors.
Comparing or Combining Theories?

In order to locate psychology in the context of IR grand theories, it
is necessary to briefly refer to some well-known philosophy-of-science
debates about how theories could be compared and, in some cases,
combined. A less discussed issue concerns the logic of dealing with these
matters through IR. To start with Thomas Kuhn (1970), he saw scientific
development as a dynamic process, in which phases of ‘normal science’
and revolutionary phases alternate. While normal science operates within
a relatively stable frame of accepted beliefs and methods, a new paradigm
grows from its increasing number of anomalies that cannot be successfully
treated by the old paradigm. Eventually the new paradigm replaces the
old one, partially incorporating its vocabulary and apparatus, but seldom
employs these borrowed elements in a traditional way. What primarily
differentiates the old and new paradigms is their incommensurable views
of seeing the world and of practicing science in it. Another philosopher
of science, Imre Lakatos (1970), argued instead that there is no sense
in waiting for a growing number of anomalies to emerge within existing
theories; rather, one should try to falsify those theories by producing a
better theory as soon as possible. His falsification concept was a consid-
erable modification of Karl Popper’s (1958, 1994) logic of scientific
discovery. Instead of the Popperian idea of falsifying individual theories
based on error elimination, Lakatos thought that the clash was not so
much between a theory and the facts, but between theories themselves.
What he termed sophisticated falsificationism meant that a theory can be
falsified if one can produce a new theory that explains the previous success
of the challenged theory while having excess empirical content, meaning
that it predicts and can at least partially corroborate some novel facts. In
essence, the empirical application area of phenomena is expanded in the
challenging theory.
While representing only two of a variety of metatheoretical constructs,
the Kuhnian and Lakatosian understandings of scientific progress, some-
times in curious combinations, have been widely applied to mainstream IR
debates. The neoliberal or institutionalist challenge of structural realism
claimed to identify some anomalies in structural realism’s explanatory
power. The school of thought then produced some additional compo-
nents added to the original scheme of realism that would fill these gaps.
In a pure Lakatosian fashion, institutionalists accepted structural realism’s
basic assumptions but added that international institutions and regimes
can overcome the cooperation problems that structural realism envis-

aged (Keohane, 1989, pp. 8–9). Many constructivists have defended their
approach in similar terms, highlighting that the idea of identity defining
interests “provides a more comprehensive ontology” compared to the
rationalist focus being merely on interests shared by both realism and
liberal institutionalism (Dessler, 1989, p. 444; Hurrel, 1993, p. 67).
In other words, constructivists claimed to be able to explain the same
phenomena as rationalism, but also phenomena that would appear to be
anomalies in the rationalist paradigm (Lapid, 1989, p. 239).
How is the above relevant to the current theme? Let us assume
that any of the IR grand theories may, in attempting to explain inter-
national politics or foreign policy behavior, come across cases where
their theoretical-methodological diagnostic finds anomalies that do not
meet the expectations of their theories, or which cannot be satisfacto-
rily explained within the existing framework. We can, for instance, well
imagine a situation where two cases that are very similar structurally have
different outcomes. This would call for us to look for an alternative,
agency-level cause or reason for that phenomenon. One possible cause
could then lie in the psychological domain of the main agents, given
that psychology is ontologically always present in foreign policy decision-
making. While this would fit the Kuhnian understanding of what should
happen when established theories face anomalies, from the Lakatosian
perspective it, adding psychological elements to the explanation, would
increase the theoretical framework’s empirical content and potentially
lead to the discovery of some novel facts to explain or understand the
outcome.
The above scenario is also in line with the more recent metatheoret-
ical IR debate, namely the ‘pragmatist turn’ that has boosted the idea
of analytical eclecticism. From this vantage point, the strict separation
of paradigmatic ‘isms’ is seen as a threshold for knowledge. Instead of
theoretical loyalty, scholars can selectively recombine analytic components
and respective causal mechanisms of competing research traditions in
the search for middle-range theoretical arguments (Haas & Haas, 2002;
Sill & Katzenstein, 2010; Friedrichs & Kratochwil, 2009). This middle-
range theorization, a term that was coined and popularized by sociologist
Robert Merton (1957), prefers theoretical formulations that could be
tested over more abstract grand theories. While middle-range theories
do not need to be logically deduced from any grand theory, there are
often clear linkages between them. In this view, the ‘isms’, while peda-
gogically useful simplifications for students, are seen as less advantageous
when it comes to empirical problem-driven research (George & Bennett,
2005, p. 128). While analytical eclecticism has its own explicit and
implicit metatheoretical commitments that can also be questioned (Reus-
Smit, 2013), it has nonetheless provided a way out of the straitjacket of
paradigms that has characterized IR as a discipline.
It is not our aim here to take a deep dive into this perennial discus-
sion. Following the mainstream understanding, we acknowledge that
there are at least three main classes of causal factors that IR grand
theories advocate—international structure, identity, and domestic poli-
tics—which are in one way or another in the background of all foreign
policy decision-making. We can be agnostic about the degree to which
various psychological factors are compatible with IR grand theories. Yet
the former do not need to have any causal priority or superior explanatory
power over other factors. We argue that better explanations and under-
standing can be achieved by combining psychological factors with other
causally significant factors when studying foreign policy decision-making.
What Do Grand Theories Say About Psychology?

Conventionally understood, structural realism focuses on the interna-
tional system (expressed as ‘external factors’ in FPA parlance), liberalism
on domestic policies (‘internal factors’), and constructivism on identity
and norms (‘cultural factors’) (Walt, 1998). Psychological factors, which
are mainly associated with an individual decision-maker’s attributes or
group dynamics in the decision-making unit, belong to what are some-
times termed microfoundations (Kertzer, 2017; Stein, 2017). The key
claim in this literature is that psychological assumptions are implicitly
part of all social theorizing, but not always explicitly recognized. Yet
grounding explanations in a better understanding of such microfounda-
tions would serve to strengthen and deepen the explanations (Kaidesoja
et al., 2019).
Realism, in its various formulations, has always had a somewhat
ambivalent relationship to psychology (Donnelly, 2000, pp. 43–80;
Edinger, 2021). Hans Morgenthau (1955), the founder of political
realism, warned against the search for the clue to foreign policy exclu-
sively in the motives of state leaders because it was both futile and
deceptive. Yet many political realists have still paid a great deal of atten-
tion to major figures in international politics and their actions, starting
from some implicit psychological analysis on the basis of the leader’s
experience or moral characteristics. Political realism assumes rationality
as the methodological starting point for analysis, yet Morgenthau (1946,
p. 154) himself fundamentally doubted the extent to which foreign policy
decision-makers or any human being can be rational; indeed, he called the
idea of human rationality a “rationalist superstition.” To the extent that
rationality in realism would be tantamount to basing one’s actions on
power alone, Reinhold Niebuhr (2013, p. 4; see also Meinecke, 1957,
p. 433) in turn admitted that in reality this is not the case: “Politics will,
to the end of history, be an area where conscience and power meet, where
the ethical and coercive factors of human life will interpenetrate and work
out their tentative and uneasy compromises.” Yet neither Morgenthau nor
other classical realists provided a clear account of the psychological aspects
of foreign policy other than the general deficiency of human nature.
Structural realism (neorealism) shifted the angle of the older political
realism away from state leaders to the structural conditions of the interna-
tional system (Elman, 1996). In a vulgar reading of structural realism, it
is sometimes maintained that any statesperson would behave in a similar
way in given structural conditions. The most visible scholar of offensive
realism in the past twenty years or so, John Mearsheimer, argues that
Russia’s actions in Ukraine in 2014 should be seen as a self-evident reac-
tion to the West’s aggressive grand strategy: “No Russian leader would
tolerate a military alliance that was Moscow’s mortal enemy until recently
moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while
the West helped install a government there that was determined to inte-
grate Ukraine into the West” (Mearsheimer, 2014, p. 82, italics added).
Hence, the psychological idiosyncrasies of individual decision-makers are
completely neglected. Yet Mearsheimer titles his article ‘Why the Ukraine
Crisis is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions that Provoked Putin’,
revealing the clear psychological microfoundations of the author’s overly
structuralist argument.
It is, however, more than fair to note that the key figure of structural
realism, Kenneth Waltz, would not have made the claim that psycho-
logical factors would not matter in international politics. He was mainly
interested in the anarchic structure of the international system (i.e., the
lack of an international government), which could not prevent wars from
occurring, and was not interested in finding the reasons for a particular
war. In contrast, in his early Man, State, and War, Waltz (2001) formu-
lated this idea in such a way that would allow a psychological element
to trigger an event or war. He categorically pointed out that the anar-
chic structure of the international system does not directly cause one
state to attack another, it just allows it. “States are motivated to attack
each other and to defend themselves by the reason and/or passion of the
comparatively few who make policies for states and of the many more
who influence the few.” Hence, “the immediate causes of every war must
be either the acts of individuals or the acts of states” (2001, p. 232). This
quotation serves as a sharp reminder that structural theorizing cannot be
self-contained.
For neoclassical realism, which aims at combining the political realism
focus on state-leaders’ agency with structural realism by moving at two
levels of analysis, the integration of psychological factors into realism
does not pose any problems (Lobell et al., 2009; Rose, 1998). For
example, William Wohlforth (1993) has emphasized the role of percep-
tions in assessing the balance of power in historical contexts. Stephen
Benedict Dyson (2009), in turn, has integrated leader personality into
the framework of neoclassical realism.
Liberalism exists in different forms in IR, but largely shares the
assumption of rationality as driver of politics (Fearon, 1998; Milner,
1997; Moravcsik, 1997). Institutionalism, presumably wrongly, is typi-
cally included within the scope of liberalism due to usage of the
term liberal institutionalism. Robert Keohane (1989, p. 62), the most
renowned champion of liberal institutionalism (but realist in his own
view), suggested that in future theory-building one should loosen the
realist assumption concerning state interests, but not the commitment
to rationality. In institutionalism’s heyday from the late 1970s to the
late 1990s, little attention was paid to the psychological dimensions of
decision-making because the idea was that impersonal institutions and
regimes would enhance cooperative practices in the spirit of predictable
reciprocity.
Many liberals see domestic politics as a causal factor in explaining
foreign policy. According to liberalist international thought, one should
look at the regime type. The most straightforward and well-known
example of this is democratic peace theory, which argues that democ-
racies do not fight each other, although they may fight non-democratic
states (Owen, 1994; Russett, 1993). A further line of liberalism, looking
inside the state for explanations, is to deliberate on the details of the polit-
ical system, political power, its structures and processes. Assuming that the
political leaders have the interest in staying in power, it can be rational for
them to create an external crisis to make it possible to intensify domestic
pressure against the opposition, and to rally the nation around the flag.
A blueprint liberal explanation of Russia’s foreign policy behavior in the
Ukraine crisis in 2014 is that the causes of the annexation of Crimea lie
in the Kremlin’s perceived threat of a Russian color revolution (McFaul
et al., 2014). Liberalism can also pay attention to the critical role of power
holders and their supporters and the most powerful lobby groups, but this
can be done without opening up the rationality assumption according to
which these groups are just fostering their pre-given interest.
As for constructivism, it is primarily regarded as a cultural or socio-
logical school that puts emphasis on collective identities and respective
norms and rules rather than on the psychology of individuals or small
groups (Shannon & Kowert, 2012). Typically, constructivists do not think
that individual psychology matters for group identity. Some seek to elimi-
nate the ‘psychological guesswork’ from the research in order to highlight
social roles and complex overlapping group identities (Neumann, 1996,
p. 139). Yet, the psychological or social-psychological factors play some
part in almost any mainstream type of constructivism; the idea of inter-
subjective communication is one of the mechanisms whereby identities
and the distinction between ‘self’ and ‘others’ are formed. Robert Jervis
(2017, p. xxix) has opined that in the more empirical variants of construc-
tivism, “the overlap with psychology is great, although often unac-
knowledged.” Some constructivist scholars engage more explicitly with
psychology and particularly with social psychological theories of identity
(Ramos, 2018). Most notably, Richard Ned Lebow (2008) builds his ‘cul-
tural theory’ on a set of assumptions of human motivation and draws
explicitly on various psychological theories (see also Hymans, 2010). The
constructivist practice theory in turn largely relies on bounded ratio-
nality which emphasizes the importance of cognition (Bruneau, 2020).
Moreover, one can also find some psychoanalytical applications in the
constructivist and post-structuralist research on identity (Heikka, 1999;
Sucharov, 2012).
Post-structuralist and other critical theories have become part of the IR
canon during past decades and are sometimes understood as alternative
grand theories in their own right. Even if they have never constituted any
one school (Lapid, 1989), these theories share (with each other and with
constructivism) the view that there is no objective reality out there and
thus psychological factors do not exist independently of our discourses
on them. They are however more interested in accounting for the socio-
historic or discursive conditions where psychological factors are located,
rather than how these factors affect foreign policy (e.g., Patomäki, 2020,
p. 439).
However, while based on stressing the agent-structure relationship,
the agency side of constructivism (and critical theories alike) remains
only sporadically theorized. In practice, the slogan of mutually consti-
tutive agents and structures is heavily weighted in favor of the latter. The
overall outcome of concentrating on collective state identities means that
at least mainstream constructivism has very little to say about foreign
policy, its decision-making processes or their outcome. It sees identity
as an enabling or constraining background factor that provides a neces-
sary layer for understanding how things develop in international politics.
When it comes to foreign policy decision-making, the identity literature
has remained at a very abstract level. If a state in a foreign policy deci-
sion situation has three or six decision options that are all compatible
with its identity—probably not a very unusual decision-making situation
in foreign policy because otherwise one would not have any choice at all—
constructivism cannot help us to prescribe, predict, describe or explain the
decision or its outcomes. Thus, psychological theories could be seen as a
useful adjunct to constructivist theories of identity.
To sum up, current IR grand theories tend to eschew the importance
of psychological factors in foreign policy decision-making. They seem to
provide overall explanations on their own terms, but they nevertheless
rely on implicit psychological microfoundations (Goldgeier & Tetlock,
2001; Kertzer, 2017; McKingley, 2014; Solomon & Steele, 2017). We
argue that psychological factors can be combined with all grand theo-
ries to their benefit. Furthermore, a focus on microfoundations can also
challenge explanations that are based on structural theories that assume
a direct, unproblematic relationship between structural conditions and
behavioral choices.
Psychology as a Causal Factor in Foreign Policy Decision-Making

We hold that while power relations, societal and cultural norms and iden-
tities, or domestic systems and politics, cannot be overlooked as structural
conditions or causal factors, in the case of most important foreign policy
decisions, this will not suffice. Such structural factors or variables provide
the necessary but not sufficient conditions for something to happen. Left
alone, as structures without agency, they are nothing more than a frame
for various non-predictable actions, some of which may blow back at these
structures and modify them.
Indeed, a good test case for the predictive and explanatory power
of IR grand theories is the aforementioned Russian behavior in respect
of the Crimean crisis in 2014. In a poll conducted among 905 Amer-
ican researchers about a week before Russia invaded Crimea (only) 14%
of those interviewed responded affirmatively to a question on whether
Russia would interfere militarily in Ukrainian affairs. No major differences
between the schools—such as realist, constructivist, or liberal—could
be detected, although area studies (in-depth knowledge of Russia and
the post-Soviet area) performed somewhat better (Maliniak et al., 2014;
Voeten, 2014). The striking fact remains that a couple of days prior to the
invasion, all IR grand theories failed to anticipate Russia’s behavior on the
basis of their respective and rather stable structurally oriented explanatory
models, but their advocates still rushed to provide their expected single-
factor explanations of the case right after it materialized (McFaul et al.,
2014). This reminds us that concepts such as power, identity, regime type
or domestic political determinants are so vague that one can always use
them to retrospectively explain an event that was regarded as unlikely
beforehand on the basis of the self-same concepts (Forsberg & Pursiainen,
2017).
The structural factors, or the dynamics of the agent-structure relation-
ship, are hence not sufficient to fully explain or understand a foreign
policy decision, and we may need to consider the psychological factors
involved in such a situation. Without understanding the psychological
dimension of the main decision-maker(s), namely the notion that beliefs,
cognitive biases, personality, and interpersonal relations may play a role,
we are not really able to explain some aspects of any decisions. This is not
a revolutionary conclusion, but suffices to raise the question of when and
how psychology matters.
While psychology is always present in human decision-making, some
decisions are rather clear-cut from the explicitly pronounced psycholog-
ical perspective and others more complex. In some cases, psychological
factors matter more than in others. We can regard it as an empirical issue
when it comes to how much they matter in comparison with a particular
baseline. It is one thing to argue that there are psychological mecha-

nisms involved in decision-making and we need to study them, but quite
another to say that they are the most important or decisive factors. Peter
Hedström and Petri Ylikoski (2010, p. 60) argue that “only those aspects
of cognition that are relevant for the explanatory task at hand should
be included in the explanation, and the explanatory task thus determines
how rich the psychological assumptions must be.” Although psycholog-
ical mechanisms can only provide partial explanations, they can however
sometimes make a crucial difference. Knowledge of rare or weak mech-
anisms still increases our understanding. When conducting research, we
may gain more by revealing new or surprising explanatory mechanisms
than proving that the most obvious explanation for an event or a pattern
of behavior has something to do with it.
What do we mean when we refer to psychological factors as partial
explanations? Even if full explanations accounting for structural condi-
tions as well as agent-structure dynamism were seen as an ideal towards
which we should strive, in practice we cannot account for everything. We
always take something for granted or think that it is not relevant for our
empirical purpose. The scope of partial explanations can be understood as
contrasts. Contrastive explanations pinpoint an aspect that is either explic-
itly or implicitly contrastive: we do not ask ‘why p’ but ‘why p [fact] rather
than q [foil]’. The benefit of a contrastive approach is that we can find
an explanatory answer satisfactory even if it is only partial. Naturally, any
scientific explanatory account can and should include several contrasts and
not just one. At the same time, the idea that explanations are contrastive
liberates us from the need to look for complete explanatory accounts
that are impossible to achieve (Forsberg, 2019). It helps us to screen out
unimportant elements and avoid attempting to account for endless regres-
sive causal chains. “Contrastive why-questions, like a microscope, zoom in
on theoretically important questions, whereas simple why-questions risk
losing important trees in the forest” (Grynaviski, 2011, p. 333). While
acknowledging that the quest for explanation never stops, the scope of
the explanation that is needed can be more moderate. It depends on our
explanatory interests, which constantly evolve and change.
Explanatory contrasts can be defined in terms of counterfactuals. A
counterfactual statement assumes a difference should the factor in ques-
tion have been absent. In real life, it is usually a question of a causal
chain, although sometimes it may be about a chancy causation without
determination. Counterfactual theories of causation start from the basic
premise that the meaning of causal claims can be explained in the form ‘In
the conditions of A, if B had not occurred, C would not have occurred’
(Menzies, 2014). Counterfactual reasoning has also been expressed in
relational terms, namely ‘Does X cause Y? If X causes Y, how large is
the effect of X on Y?’, and then manipulating the question by replacing
it with more precise causal questions with clear counterfactual contrasts,
such as ‘If individuals with X = x had had X = x + n instead, how much
would the value for Y have changed?’ (Morgan & Winship, 2015, p. 13).
While there are several sophisticated articulations of the basic principle,
the theory simply proposes that non-actual possible worlds should and
could be compared with the materialized world. Indeed, all causal claims
imply some kind of counterfactual, and it has been argued that good FPA
must engage and employ counterfactuals (Lebow, 2017). Independently
of the methodological difficulties that exist in proving the counterfac-
tual alternatives right or wrong, they help us to assess the plausibility of
explanations.
We can then regard the psychological factors as counterfactuals, more
precisely as enablers, constraints, directives or triggers (B) vis-à-vis a
decision (C) in structural conditions (A). While these words imply a
variety of routes for causal inference or causal mechanism (Checkel,
2006; Hedström & Ylikoski, 2010; Morgan & Winship, 2015), they
can nevertheless be seen as potentially or sometimes necessary causally
difference-making factors. Therefore we must ask: Does it matter that a
decision-maker has this or that kind of psychological characteristic, cogni-
tive capability, state of mind or emotional condition? At first glance,
this appears to be a traditional positivist cause and effect relationship,
but we can just as easily see psychological factors as addressing the
‘How is it possible?’ question favored by constructivists (Doty, 1993).
There is, indeed, nothing that would preclude understanding the role
of psychological factors in terms of the realist philosophy of explanatory
mechanisms that do not assume any constant conjunctions but, rather,
powers that produce tendencies.
Although all psychological factors are embedded in structures, our
focus is put on agency-level attributes and variables. This scheme is
illustrated in Table 1.1 and largely corresponds with the constructivist
understanding of FPA (cf. Carlsnaes, 1992, pp. 254, 264). Nevertheless,
the table can easily be understood also as a typical positivist independent-
intervening-dependent variables fashion, because the structural conditions
in our scheme are treated as temporarily ‘given’. Hence psychology
plays the role of intervening variable explaining the relation between
Table 1.1 Psychology as a causal factor in foreign policy decision-making
Structure Agency Outcome

Conditions that constitute The properties and capacities Foreign policy decisions
agency, temporarily taken as of the foreign policy that may reproduce or
‘given’ in analyzing decision-makers embedded in change the structural
situational foreign policy the non-deterministic social conditions through
decision-making structure, including intended and unintended
consequences
The international system

External structural conditions
such as anarchy, polarity,
balance of power, alliance
constellations, geopolitical
conditions, level of
institutionalization, global
political economy
Identities and norms Psychology Foreign policy
Culturally constructed Psychological factors that are decision-making
normative structures and always present in foreign
established practices, based policy decision-making but
on intersubjective relations cannot be derived from
Domestic politics structural conditions or
Internal structural conditions predicted with certainty, and
such as regime type, which may have a crucial
political-administrative and direct or indirect impact on
decision-making systems, decision-making
domestic balance of power
the independent and dependent variables. This becomes a heuristically

useful typology for theorizing and investigating the role of psycholog-
ical factors in foreign policy decision-making in line with Elias Götz’s
(2021) differentiation between three types of causal factors under the
label of intervening variables: moderating factors, complementary factors,
and primary causes. Moderating factors are only supposed to influence
the strength of the relationship between resumed cause and effect, and
are not really directly related to either of them; like a seatbelt or an
airbag in a car accident caused by driving too fast. Complementary factors
would then be more residual unit-level intervening variables; similar to
the technical characteristics of the car or its classification. Primary causes
as an intervening variable, in turn, reduce independent variables only to
background systemic permissive conditions, whereas the primary causes
themselves are major unit-level causes that have a direct and immediate
effect on the value of the dependent variable; like the characteristics

or behavior of the driver. Thus, regardless of whether one relies on a
strong structurationist or alternatively semi-positivist vocabulary, the task
of psychological theories in IR/FPA would be to illuminate the types and
mechanisms of the measurable or hypothetical impact of psychology on
foreign policy decision-making under the given structural conditions and
within a situational context.
From the agent-structure angle, the emphasis in our scheme is on
agency. However, it has to be emphasized that this scheme does not
presuppose that psychological factors are the only agency-level factors
that may contribute to contingencies. Other factors may be derived from
other relevant theories, such as the bureaucratic politics model with its
formal/informal power dynamics (Drezner, 2000; Halperin et al., 2006).
Nor does our scheme assume that foreign policy decisions are without
historical path dependency (Leithner & Libby, 2017), being ontolog-
ically isolated one-shot decisions. The path dependency can be taken
into account when investigating individual decisions from a psychological
perspective. Furthermore, while our approach does not directly consider
the multiple residual forces and unpredictable coincidences that interfere
with the decision-making process, they become indirectly important. Kjell
Goldmann (1982, p. 240) has noted that theorizing about such residual
factors may not be meaningful in FPA, “but it does seem meaningful to
search for factors that make a policy more or less sensitive to such event.”
From this perspective, psychological factors can obviously make a differ-
ence in how the decision-makers face these kinds of situations. Finally, our
scheme does not assume that agency does not have any potential to affect
the structures that constitute them. Our focus is however more on the
actual decision-making than its constitutive conditions or consequences.
There are several methodological alternatives that could be applied
when the causal effects of psychological factors are studied in concrete
cases or across a set of cases, using appropriate quantitative, semi-
quantitative or qualitative data-gathering approaches. These include,
for instance, hypothetical intervention strategies in process tracing
(Runhardt, 2020), experimental studies (Morgan & Winship, 2015), or
in comparative case studies the operationalization of the ‘same type’,
‘most similar’, ‘most likely’, ‘least likely’, ‘crucial’, and ‘least similar’
case research designs (George & Bennett, 2005, pp. 252–253). In other
words, the role of psychological factors can be seen as a variable that
can explain the similarity or difference in outcomes, in relation to known

structural conditions. This, in turn, may give rise to further theory
construction or refinement of previous theoretical statements.
Foreign Policy Analysis and Psychology

As a major subfield of IR, FPA is naturally a much broader field than
mere psychological approaches. However, FPA has practically reversed its
erstwhile quest for an all-encompassing theoretical-methodological frame-
work. It has become—at least at first glance—a collection of potentially
incommensurable middle-range theories, deliberating on one explanatory
factor or another (Hudson, 2007; Beach, 2012; Alden & Aran, 2012).
Psychological theorizing has however always played a prominent role
in FPA. Over six decades ago, Margaret and Harold Sprout, regarded
as pioneers of FPA, made a famous distinction between the opera-
tional environment and the psychological environment. Such elements
as attitudinal prism and elite attitudes served as sifters of sorts through
which information from the operational environment was filtered into the
decision-making system (Brecher et al., 1969; Sprout & Sprout, 1956).
The interest in psychology then became a small but crucial part of the
main goal to reform the study of international politics along behavioralist
principles in the 1960s. The traditionalist approaches were regarded as
forming an amalgam of rival single-factor theories such as balance of
power, historical heritage, ideology, the political system, or geopolitics
without being based on a uniform frame or proper methodology (Glaser,
1956). FPA, in turn, originally aimed at holistic explanatory models that
could be used in complex large-N comparative studies, and the quest for
generic scientific laws in foreign policy decision-making (Andriole et al.,
1975; Brecher et al., 1969; Deutsch, 1969; Gross, 1954; McGowan &
Shapiro, 1973; Modelski, 1962; Rosenau, 1966, 1971, 1981; Salmore
& Hermann, 1978; Snyder et al., 1954). In 1966, one of the pioneers
of FPA, James N. Rosenau (1966) formulated taxonomical ‘pre-theories’
as a step towards a proper theory of foreign policy, for which he set
remarkably high criteria. He envisioned a theory that would be generic
and comparative, not only suitable for explaining the foreign policy of
one, but several or all states. Psychological factors would be one element
in such a comprehensive theory that could be proven right or wrong by
testing the hypotheses with some measurable criteria.
Several research projects were conducted in this spirit. One of the

best examples is Margaret G. Hermann’s (1980) extensive large-N study,
reported in an article ‘Explaining Foreign Policy Behavior Using the
Personal Characteristics of Political Leaders’. Great efforts to build a more
and more comprehensive datasets and develop sophisticated method-
ologies were indeed made, most notably the comparative model with
empirical applications called CREON (Comparative Research on the
Events of Nations) (Hermann, 1975; Hermann et al., 1987; Hermann &
Hermann, 1989; Stewart et al., 1989; see also Hudson, 2007, pp. 178–
184). Many see the project, active at the end of the 1980s, as a last lost
flagship of FPA. The task simply proved too demanding and ambitious as
one was not able to include and manage all of the possible explanatory
factors, levels and interactions simultaneously, especially from the large-N
comparative perspective, and create meaningful holistic theoretical results
or scientific laws. As behaviorist FPA did not meet expectations, the whole
research program degenerated. Along with most of the FPA, psycholog-
ical approaches drifted into the shadow of structural theorizing (Smith,
1986). Consequently, in FPA, the focus shifted from the efforts to build
an all-encompassing comparative theory of foreign policy onto single-case
studies of individual decisions and the behavior of individual states.
Overall, the study of foreign policy became less theoretically oriented
and seldom carried out under the somewhat discredited heading of
FPA. If theoretical approaches were employed, they seldom drew on
psychology. Instead of decision-making, the emphasis was placed on
historical analysis, national traditions and geopolitics. Decision-making
was analyzed almost exclusively by means of formal game theory. In this
context, societal factors, media as well as discourse were seen as offering
new perspectives. True, there was a flicker of interest in psychological
theories in the FPA literature (Jönsson, 1982; Singer & Hudson, 1992),
but it only had a marginal effect on IR throughout most of the late 1980s
and 1990s.
However, a renaissance of sorts can be identified in FPA since the
mid-2000s. The renewed interest towards foreign policy theories as a
specific field in IR is visible in the growing number of articles and text-
books (Alden & Aran, 2012; Beach, 2012; Breuning, 2007; Hudson,
2007; Mintz & DeRouen Jr., 2010; Morin & Paquin, 2018; Walker
et al., 2011), as well as the raised profile manifested in dedicated jour-
nals and institutionalized scholarly networks. Psychological approaches
to FPA received their fair share of this buoyant scholarship. This trend
in IR reflects the growing prominence of psychological approaches in

various neighboring disciplines (Beyer, 2019; Clément & Sangar, 2018;
Goldgeier & Tetlock, 2001; Kertzer & Tingley, 2018; McDermott,
2004). Behavioral economics, cognitive sociology and the ‘emotional
turn’ in cultural studies have become fashionable brands beyond their
disciplinary boundaries (Ahmed, 2004; Cerulo, 2002; Kaidesoja et al.,
2019; Thaler, 2015). Although any talk of scientific turns is probably a
misleading metaphor as the development of disciplines is not unitary but
reflects growing specialization and fragmentation, the idea of scrutinizing
microfoundations in order to renew established structural theories has
become attractive. Bringing recent research in psychology to bear in the
contemporary study of international politics is one sign of a pendulum
swing typical of scientific evolution when an old approach that has been
neglected for some time is rediscovered by a new generation of scholars.
While many basic theoretical approaches have remained more or less
intact, the leaps that psychological research has taken during the past
decades in neuroscience, the interdisciplinary cognitive sciences, and
evolutionary psychology have boosted claims that bringing impulses
from psychology into a variety of fields in social sciences is a fruitful
mission. In particular, neuroscience’s penetration into social sciences,
resulting in such new specialized research fields as social cognitive neuro-
science, neuropolitics, neuroeconomics, and neurolaw, has opened up
avenues that provide both new theoretical constructs, empirical data, and
neuroimaging tools for social analysis, but also legitimate fears about
the ethical implications and threats to democratic deliberation caused by
this development (Schreiber, 2017). Social-psychological approaches that
provide fundamental insights into the origin and characteristics of collec-
tive identities have been incorporated into the FPA literature (Kaarbo,
2002, pp. 156–163). More fundamentally, the basic view of the domi-
nance of competitive instincts of human nature that has dominated
social psychology and remained unquestioned in mainstream IR has been
contested (Pinker, 2011). Yet there is no unitary psychological theory or
set of discoveries that could be absorbed and applied. It has become an
impossible task for a single researcher to review the psychological litera-
ture in the same way that Robert Jervis (2017, p. xxi) did in late 1960s,
and to combine the most prominent theoretical insights with various
examples drawn from diplomatic history. Although artificial intelligence
may produce comprehensive literature reviews, in practice researchers
have had to focus on a limited number of psychological theories in order

to stay current.
Contemporary FPA has hence shed the ambition of presenting a
unified approach at a general level. As reflected in the current text-
books, it consists of a cluster of multiple approaches that can be seen
as middle-range theorizing, applied to cases where they seem to make
sense, but seldom seeking any synthesized model, as noted by Chris
Alden and Amnon Aran (2012, pp. 118–120; see also Hudson, 2007;
McDermott, 2004; Mintz and DeRouen Jr., 2010; Rapport, 2017). They
call this a shift away from a quest for Kuhnian normal science towards
middle-range theories that emphasize what they call axial factors, such as
decision-makers and bureaucracies. The price of this empirically oriented
middle-range theorizing is that one is less able to provide generic expla-
nations of any foreign policy. Yet middle-range theories may produce
generalizations that are narrower both in scope and in domain than
those of IR grand theories. Such theories can be better tested than
grand theories via careful case-study research designs with substantial
process-tracing, experimental or other similarly detailed methodologies.
By contrast, without spelling out the mechanisms at the level of middle-
range theorizing, the more abstract grand theories cannot be falsified or
proved valid (George & Bennett, 2005, p. 22).
This means that psychological FPA has mainly been applied to indi-
vidual states rather than fulfilling the early ambition to generate compar-
ative studies aimed at generalizations. This has been beneficial insomuch
as psychological theories have been easier to accommodate to the histor-
ical, cultural and political attributes of the state that dominate the public
debate on foreign policy, particularly within the country itself. At the same
time, it has raised the question of whether the identified psychological
tendencies are applicable to other states and whether the dominance of
US foreign policy decision-making as the object of empirical study—as
well reflected in the current volume’s empirical illustrations—has created
too strong a bias in apprehending which psychological mechanisms are
relevant and frequent. Studies on the foreign policy of small states tend
to remain less cited and debated, even if such studies were to deal with
generic psychological mechanisms. The idea of spelling out possible scope
conditions for the sake of demarcating the limits of generalization would
make sense in quantitative studies, but it is arbitrary to define them on
the basis of single-case studies (Foschi, 1998; Walker & Cohen, 1985).
Another random document with
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down there, but a whole battalion of men. The fires were fiercely
glaring from a long row of furnaces, and over them were eight huge
boilers.”
The accompanying picture, which is taken from a lithograph
printed in 1855, shows two of the finest contemporary Mississippi
steamboats. The Eclipse was propelled by a high-pressure engine
with a single cylinder, the paddle-wheels being 40 feet wide. Her two
boilers were placed forward about 3½ feet above the deck, having
internal return tubes, such as we discussed at an earlier stage. The
waste gases returned through the tubes and escaped through the
funnels, which rose 50 feet above the hurricane deck. This ship only
drew 5 feet, and measured 360 feet long and 42 feet wide, whilst the
hull was 8 feet deep. For fuel, rosin and pitch pine as well as coal
were used. Mark Twain has left us some details of the keenness with
which these and similar Mississippi steamboats used to race.
“In the olden times,” he wrote, “whenever two fast boats started
out on a race, with a big crowd of people looking on, it was inspiriting
to hear the crews sing, especially if the time were night-fall, and the
forecastle lit up with the red glare of the torch-baskets. Racing was
royal fun. The public always had the idea that racing was dangerous;
whereas the opposite was the case.... No engineer was ever sleepy
or careless when his heart was in a race. He was constantly on the
alert, trying gauge-cocks and watching things. The dangerous place
was on slow, plodding boats, where the engineers drowsed around
and allowed chips to get into the ‘doctor,’ and shut off the water
supply from the boilers. In the ‘flush times’ of steam-boating, a race
between two notorious fleet steamers was an event of vast
importance.... Every encumbrance that added weight, or exposed a
resisting surface to wind or water, was removed.... When the Eclipse
and the A. L. Shotwell ran their great race many years ago, it was
said that pains were taken to scrape the gilding off the fanciful device
which hung between the Eclipse’s chimneys and that for one trip the
captain left off his kid gloves and had his head shaved. But I always
doubted these things.”
In 1870 the Natchez ran from New Orleans to Natchez, a
distance of 268 miles, in seventeen days seventeen hours. The most
famous race of all, and one that created national interest, was that in
the year 1870, between the Robert E. Lee and the Natchez, from
New Orleans to St. Louis, a distance of 1,218 miles. The former
covered the journey in three days eighteen hours fourteen minutes,
the latter in three days twenty-one hours fifty-eight minutes, but the
officers of the Natchez claimed seven hours for having had to stop
through fog, and repairs to the machinery.
But let us pass further North. The Hudson has, since the time of
Fulton, been famous for its steam-craft, and the impetus which
necessarily followed after the success of the Clermont, and her
successors, has not yet ceased to exist. As representative of the
Hudson River type of boats in vogue during the ’sixties, the model of
the steamer Empire facing page 258 is not without interest, since it
shows, the half-way transition between the Clermont and the ultra-
modern built-up ship as in the illustration facing page 262. Like her
other sisters, the Empire, it will be seen, has a very light draught,
and a characteristic feature of the development of the North
American passenger side-wheel steamer is here to be noted in
embryo, and as pushed to its furthest limits, in the case of the
Commonwealth. I am calling attention to the manner in which the
American custom extends the steamship’s sponsons or “guards” (as
they are called). In a British paddle-wheel steamer, such as one finds
employed on passenger or tug service, the sponsons are quite short.
(This can easily be seen by reference to the Dromedary opposite
page 240.) But the American fashion is to allow these not to end
suddenly, but gradually fine off at bow and stern so that the deck is
carried well out-board. Forward is the pilot house, the passenger
accommodation being provided in the centre of the “guard” deck and
upper deck. The length of this vessel was 336 feet, whilst the
breadth of the hull proper was 28 feet, though including “guards” 61
feet. In many of the Hudson steamers the strange sight is still seen
of the use of the old walking-beam which penetrates through the top
of the deck. As we have already discussed this elsewhere, it is
scarcely necessary here to refer to it further, but the sectional model
illustrated opposite this page will show quite clearly this principle.
THE “COMMONWEALTH.”
BEAM ENGINE OF AN AMERICAN RIVER STEAMER.

From the Sectional Model in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
One of the best known steamship companies in the United
States is the Fall River Line, belonging to the New England
Navigation Company. The Fall River Line runs from New York to
Boston, and their vessels are of exceptional interest as being
propelled by paddle-wheels notwithstanding that their size is in some
cases of from four to six thousand tons. Characteristic, too, is the
extent to which the decks tier aloft and spread out beyond the hull of
the ship. Among their fleet may be reckoned the Priscilla, Puritan,
and Providence, vessels which vary in length from over, to just
under, 400 feet, with a beam of about 50 feet, but including “guards”
about another 30 feet. Opposite this page will be seen the
Commonwealth, the flagship of this celebrated fleet, and the most
modern. Instead of the paddle-boxes rising to a great height, they
are absorbed by the excessive amount of top-hamper. To such an
extent, also, has the widest beam of the ship been pushed that the
paddle-wheels are scarcely discernible, being quite underneath the
“guards,” instead of projecting from the hull. The Commonwealth
plies between New York and Boston via Newport and the Fall River,
and is the largest and most magnificent steamship built for service
on inland waters. Some idea of her value may be gathered when we
remark that she cost £400,000 to build. It will be seen that she has
been given a high bow, for the reason that she must be a good sea-
boat, since part of her route is exposed to the Atlantic. She is 456
feet long, 96 feet wide (reckoning in the “guards”), and has sleeping
accommodation for two thousand people. This voyage is performed
in about twelve hours, mostly by night, from New York to the Fall
River, and the retention of the paddle-wheel gives an absence of
vibration, and enables the nerve-wrecked citizen to sleep as
peacefully as on shore. The Commonwealth is steady in a sea-way,
and has pushed the cult of luxury just about as far as it can go, whilst
yet retaining any of the accustomed characteristics of the ship.
Practically these craft are remarkably up-to-date hotels moved by a
pair of paddle-wheels. Replete with their barber’s shops, cafés,
libraries, saloons, orchestra, galleries, stairways, dining-rooms,
spacious bedrooms, kitchens, and other features too numerous to
mention, they are representative afloat of the prevailing passion
ashore for luxury and personal comfort. The Commonwealth, like her
sisters of the same fleet, is built of steel, and for greater safety she
has seven bulkheads, which extend to the main deck, and are so
installed that no carelessness can leave the doors open. Her hull is
double and the space between the bottoms is divided into numerous
water-tight compartments, whilst collision bulkheads are also placed
at each side of the steamer at the “guards.” Her speed is twenty-two
knots per hour, which is obtained by compound engines, with two
high-pressure cylinders. The paddle-wheels are of the feathering
type, with curved steel buckets, and in addition to the usual steam
pumps, there is a large pump for use on the fire-sprinkler system
which covers the whole interior of the ship. The ship has a powerful
search-light, and an electric lift to the kitchen. In case both her
steam-steering and hand-gear should get out of order the ship can
be steered by independent auxiliary gear attached direct to the
rudder stock.
Having regard to the fact that it was North America which played
so prominent a part in the history and introduction of the steamship,
it is by no means unfitting that that country should also have
developed the paddle-wheel steamboat to an extent that is entirely
unknown in Great Britain. The difference in types is partly owing to
the difference in tastes and habits between the two peoples, but also
owing to the contrast in geographical arrangement. We in England
have nothing comparable with the Hudson, for instance, and its fine,
long sweep of navigable water; nor with the vast American Great
Lakes, which, in a unique manner, have held out a special kind of
encouragement to the steamship. As carriers not merely of cargoes,
but also of passengers, especially during the tourist seasons, the
steamships on the Great Lakes have attained the character rather
analogous to the ocean liner than to the inland steamboat. The spirit
of luxury is not concealed in these Lake liners, and some idea of one
of the two-funnelled passenger steamboats now plying on the Great
Lakes of America may be seen in the illustration facing this page of
the City of Cleveland. The two characteristics already noted in the
case of the Hudson and the Fall River steamships will here be
noticed still further. We refer to the extent of the added decks, and to
the increased beam which is given to the ship by means of the
“guards.”
THE “CITY OF CLEVELAND.”
AN AMERICAN “WHALE-BACK” STEAMER.

But perhaps the most extraordinary looking American steamship
is the well-known “whale-back” which is in use on the Great Lakes as
a cargo-carrier. Practically speaking she is just a whale-like steel
tank with an engine and propeller at the stern. Anything but comely
in appearance, she is something of the American counterpart of the
British turret-ship, but with one difference. The American type has no
turret, but is just a long curved box with two comparatively small
erections at bow and stern respectively, as will be seen by examining
the photograph of one of these vessels reproduced opposite page
264. But the design of these Lake steamers is to carry the largest
amount of cargo with the lowest registered tonnage, and this object
is attained with satisfactory results, for there is scarcely any space at
all in the ships but is thus employed.
And with this we may bring our chapter to an end. We have now
seen the rise, the gradual growth, and the specialisation of the
steamship in many ways, and in many different localities whenever
employed as a commercial money-earning concern. But the
steamship, like the sailing ship, is not exclusively employed either for
commerce or for war. With the latter kind of ships we have in the
present volume no concern; but with regard to the development of
the steam yacht we shall now have something to say.
CHAPTER X
THE STEAM YACHT
That the steamship should become for the sportsman what for
some time the sailing vessel had been was a natural prophecy. Even
if steam were not to oust the simpler craft, at least both might sail the
seas together without let or hindrance. But, of course, the old
prejudice asserted itself again in yachting just as we have so
frequently through the pages of this book seen that it did in the
evolution of the purely commercial and experimental ships.
The pioneer of the steam yacht was undoubtedly the late Mr.
Assheton Smith, of Tedworth, near Andover. A man of substantial
means, a keen sportsman, who was well-known among both hunting
and yachting men, he was rather more far-sighted than his
contemporaries, and considerably less prejudiced. He had owned a
number of sailing yachts, was a member of the Royal Yacht
Squadron, and had it in mind to extend the encouragement of the
sport also to vessels using steam. But to the select and conservative
minds of the Royal Yacht Squadron this was by no means a happy
suggestion, and they promptly showed their resentment by passing a
resolution on May 5th, 1827, to the effect that since a material object
of the club was to promote seamanship and improvements of sailing
vessels to which the application of steam-engines was inimical, no
vessel propelled by steam should be admitted into the club, and that
any member applying a steam engine to his yacht should cease to
be a member. As the late Mr. Montague Guest, in his history of the
Royal Yacht Squadron, remarked, this prejudice was no doubt
caused by the objectionable vomits of smoke which contemporary
steamers in that locality were wont to emit, so that the fair shores of
Southampton Water were polluted, and distant objects completely
obscured. Smith was taunted with the remark that in wishing to
introduce the steam yacht he was intending to make a connection
between business and pleasure, and this insult stung him so
severely that he eventually resigned his membership.
In August of 1827, the Northern Yacht Club offered at their
regatta a twenty guinea cup, to be awarded to the swiftest
steamboat, and so far as I am able to ascertain this was the first
occasion when steam craft ever raced against each other under
such conditions. Several steam vessel owners sent in their entries
for the race, and after an exciting contest for three hours round a
marked course, a paddle-ship, named the Clarence, won. This is
especially interesting, inasmuch as that boat had been engined by
the famous Robert Napier to whom we referred earlier in this book,
and in more ways than one this success led to considerable
success. The incident attracted the attention of Assheton Smith,
who, although he was then fifty years old, was fired with enthusiasm
over the possibilities of the new sport. He had already had five
sailing yachts built for him, and after resigning from the Royal Yacht
Squadron, wrote to Napier asking him to come south to his place
near Andover. Neither had met before, and the upshot of the
northerner’s visit was that he was commissioned to build a steam
yacht, the cost of which came to £20,000, Napier being given a free
hand in regard to her entire construction. A recent writer has seen fit
to remark that “no account exists of the first steam yacht built by Mr.
Smith,” so that it may be worth while to add that this vessel was
named the Menai, that she was built in the year 1830 and delivered
at Bristol. She measured 120 feet long and 20 feet wide, her tonnage
being 230, and her nominal horse-power 110. She was, of course, a
paddle-wheel craft and driven by Napier’s double side-lever engines,
of which we have already explained the detailed working. Those who
wish to see what this first historic steam yacht was like can examine
a model of her in the Glasgow Art Galleries.
The Menai turned out a great success, and so pleased was her
owner, that he commissioned Napier to build him another boat,
which was named the Glowworm, a vessel of 300 tons and 100
horse-power. She was made ready by 1838. Until Smith was eighty
years old the connection thus formed between the two men was
continued, and during the period of twenty or thirty years Napier built
quite a fleet of steam yachts for his patron. The Glowworm was
followed by the Fire King in 1839—this being a 700-ton ship and the
biggest of them all. Afterwards came at different dates three Fire
Queens (in honour of Queen Victoria, who had come to the throne
since the first steam yacht had been launched), the Jenny Lind, and
the Sea Serpent; the latter about 1851. The Fire King was designed
with hollow water-lines, and was a vessel possessing considerable
speed. Before her trials were run, Smith issued a public challenge in
Bell’s Life that she would run against any steamer then afloat, from
Dover Pier to the Eddystone Lighthouse and back, for 5,000
guineas, or even higher stakes if desired. One of the three Fire
Queens was the fastest vessel of any kind at that time, and
possessed the exceptional speed of 16 knots. This was the third
vessel of that name, and was built in 1846, her tonnage being 300
and her horse-power 120. She was driven by steeple engines which
actuated a screw, and the Admiralty thought so much of her that they
purchased her as a packet. Smith, however, did not like the screw,
and his next ship reverted to the use of paddle-wheels.
In 1844 the Royal Yacht Squadron began to climb down
gradually from their haughty position of serene isolation, for in that
year they showed some slight recognition of the steam yacht by
resolving that “no steamer of less than 100 horse-power should be
qualified for admission into, or entitled to the privileges of the
Squadron,” and in 1853 the last objection to the steam yacht was
withdrawn by the rescinding of all rules which prohibited her use.
Thereupon a number of the Royal Squadron members had auxiliary
engines fitted to their sailing craft, but by 1856 there were not more
than a score of steam-engined yachts as against seven or eight
hundred sailing ones. In 1868 a unique race, which excited some
derision at the time, was run between Lord Vane’s steam yacht
Cornelia and Mr. Talbot’s Eothen. During the early ’eighties many of
the non-racing yachts flying the Squadron’s colours, and used solely
for cruising, were either purely steam or auxiliary steam yachts. By
1883, out of 2,000 yachts no fewer than 700 were steam, which had
cost originally two and a half millions sterling. To such an extent had
this new development of the sport gone ahead that it was even
seriously suggested by the Field that ordinary cruising would be
extinguished by the steam yacht. During the ’eighties the number of
English steam yachts multiplied in all parts of the Kingdom owing to
several causes. The improvements which had been going on, as well
in the making of marine engines as in yacht building and designing,
were assisted by the more economical consumption of coal which
was now possible. But the sport of steam-yachting is entirely, by
reason of its nature and its costliness, confined to the rich man.
Apart altogether from the advantages which steam gives in that it
renders the yacht independent of calms and tides, yet it carries with
it especially a social feature. The influence of Cowes week, the
dispensing of hospitality, and the privilege of enjoying a floating
home anything but bereft of the highest comfort, must be reckoned
as among the potent factors of an extent equal to, if not greater than,
the sheer delight of voyaging from one port to another. Many steam
yachts spend their time within the comparatively sheltered waters of
the south coast of England, or the west coast of Scotland, perhaps
running out to the Riviera in December or January. But a few, such
as Lord Brassey’s celebrated Sunbeam, go round the world,
penetrate to the Arctic circle, cross the Atlantic, and go east through
the Suez Canal.
TYPICAL STEAM YACHT OF ABOUT 1890.
By permission of “The Yachting Monthly.”
For a long time the steam yacht naturally enough retained most
of the features of the sailing yacht. I say naturally, not merely
because steam was still distrusted, and, therefore, canvas was
retained, but because beauty of form and symmetry are demanded
more in the steam yacht than in the steamship designed for
commercial purposes. For the creators of steam yachts were rather
yacht-architects than steamship-designers. We have only to quote
the admirable work of such men as St. Clare Byrne and G. L.
Watson to emphasise this point. Indeed, with the exception of the
Triad, so recently added to the fleet of steam yachts, and to which
we shall refer fully in due course, the lines and general appearance
of the steam pleasure vessel is far more “yachty” than perhaps one
might have imagined would be the case, having regard to the
differences which have sprung up in the appearance of the
commercial steamship. The illustration on page 271, which is typical
of the steam yacht about the year 1890, shows how markedly the
influence of the clipper sailing ships of the ’sixties was at work. The
gilding at the bow, the figure-head, the fine entrance, and the
bowsprit have existed long after the latter was required for setting a
jib at the end of it. As a rule, the schooner rig has prevailed, though
some ocean-going steam yachts are rigged as barques, ships, and
barquentines. For long voyages between distant ports the retention
of the sail as a saving of the limited coal supply is but natural, and
also for the purpose of steadying the ship in a sea-way.
In the early days the steam yacht was usually of the type which
has one flush deck. But to-day she varies to the same extent as the
sailing yacht. Topgallant forecastles, quarter decks, bridge-houses,
awning decks, shade decks, spar decks, and many other features
have been added. Three masts have given way to two, and now only
one is being retained, and that merely for signalling purposes or for
wireless telegraphy. Formerly, the steam yacht was a long, narrow
creation carrying a considerable quantity of ballast, but to-day she is
given greater beam, and in many points is coming far more under
the sway of the ocean steamship than ever she has in the whole of
her history. The accommodation is being modified and improved,
and the elemental features are undergoing a change. Whereas the
older types carried their dining and drawing-rooms below, nowadays
these, as well as the state-rooms, are, whenever possible, placed on
the main deck. Much more room is afforded for promenade by the
adding of deck upon deck, and a noticeable characteristic of the
modern steam yacht is the extent to which the deck-house and pilot-
house have been carried. Like their bigger sisters, the steam yachts
of to-day are fitted with every thought for comfort. Electric light,
refrigerating plant, exquisite decorations, heating apparatus, search-
lights, and a thousand other details go to swell the long bill which
has to be paid for the private steamship.
The old square stern inherited from the Dutch, through the
British Navy of yesterday, and, finally, through the royal yachts, is
modified nowadays from a clumsiness to resemble more nearly the
counter of the smart sailing yacht. Ample overhang at bow and stern
gives both increased deck space and makes a drier ship, and at the
bows this additional room is advantageous for working the anchors.
As compared with the liner, the yacht has far more opportunities of
showing what a graceful creature the ship really is: for she has not to
rush across seas at break-neck speed, nor has she to waste her
internal space with accommodation for cargo and mails. She need
not clutter up her decks with clusters of derricks, but go about her
easy work in a quiet and dignified manner, not forgetting to look
pretty all the time. And yet she is able nowadays, by reason of her
size, to carry large enough quantities of water, coals and stores to
last her for lengthy voyages, independent of the shore. The question
of speed is subservient to fuel-endurance, and to get her owner and
his guests to their destination with the least degree of discomfort is
of far greater import than to set up new steaming records. She is a
good sea-boat, for she is not harassed by the limitations as to the
distribution of weights which have to be studied so closely in the
case of the liner. The single-screw is giving way to the twin-screw,
and the triple-expansion engine is usually adopted, with its absence
of any great vibration.
The steam yacht, has, however, found out the advantages of the
turbine, and the first to be fitted thus was the Emerald, built on the
Clyde in 1902 for Sir Christopher Furness. She has a Thames
measurement of 797, and is propelled by three separate propellers,
with their individual shafts actuated by three sets of turbine
machinery. Her speed is about 16 knots on an exceptionally low coal
consumption, and she showed her ability by crossing the Atlantic in
the year following her birth. The recent adaptation of the Parsons
turbine for moderate speeds, already discussed, will doubtless pave
the way for a much more general adoption of this form of propulsion
in the yacht. Otherwise speed in the steam yacht is a doubtful
advantage, for with reciprocating engines there is demanded a
greater amount of space which could be better used for extra cabin
room. Water-ballast and bilge-keels are used to a large extent, and
steel has long since proved its worth for the making of the hull as
well as many other features of the ship. Now that the engines of a
steam yacht have proved themselves to possess that reliability which
was for a long time not conceded, the need for sails, except for
steadying the ship, or, as already mentioned, for long ocean
voyages, has disappeared. It is much more common to see a steam
yacht given the rig as seen in the illustration on page 275, with stay-
sails and try-sails, than the yards and gaff-sails of yesterday. Indeed,
one might go so far as to assert that the retention of the two masts is
based on appearance more than with a view to utility.
A STEAM YACHT TO-DAY.
By permission of “The Yachting Monthly.”
THE RUSSIAN IMPERIAL YACHT “LIVADIA.”

From the Model in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
One of the most extraordinary steam yachts ever built was the
Livadia, of which a capital model is illustrated opposite page 276.
She was built in 1880 by Messrs. John Elder & Co. for the Russian
Admiralty. Her unusual design was based on the idea of a circular
floating battery invented by John Elder in the ’sixties, and
reintroduced by Admiral Popoff ten years later. From a technical
paper read some years ago by her builder, we gather that she was
constructed in accordance with Admiral Popoff’s designs to give 14
knots per hour. In case of her failing to come up to the required
standard, the Russian Admiralty were to be allowed to reject her.
Previous to her actual building, elaborate experiments took place
with a model, and both before and after the appearance of the ship
she was subject to considerable criticism, some of which, no doubt,
was owing to the radical departure from accepted custom. Her
builder described her as being turbot-shaped with a super-structure
which contained the Imperial apartments and the accommodation for
suite and crew. After her trials, she sailed from the Clyde to Brest in
fine weather. Thence she crossed the Bay of Biscay, and the bad
weather which had sprung up increased to a gale of exceptional
violence, which also afforded the most conclusive test for her
steadiness. It was found that she was wonderfully endowed with the
latter virtue, and that although she had been designed for service on
the Black Sea, she was able to take the seas of the Bay in a most
satisfactory manner. The height of the waves was adjudged by the
experts on board as being from twenty to twenty-five feet, but the
receding formation of the turbot had the effect of dividing the wave
against itself. In no case did the waves succeed in reaching the
keels of the ship’s boats hung in davits 22 feet above the load-line,
and although the table was loaded with candelabra and other easily
capsizable articles, the ship never lurched so as to send them
moving. It is true that when she put into Ferrol, owing to the
exhaustion of the crew, two of the thirty-seven cells on the external
rim of the turbot were damaged, yet this did not vitiate the general
principle of her construction. She was driven by three propellers and
three independent engines, and was easily handled. During the gale
she only required one man at the wheel. She displaced nearly 4,000
tons, measured 235 feet in length, 153 feet in extreme width, and
drew only 6½ feet.
Perhaps the one conspicuous example where the steam yacht
has been designed not by a yacht architect is in the case of the
steam yachts possessed by the Royalty of this land, and it is a
matter of regret that some of the worst and most old-fashioned
traditions should be perpetuated in what one would have expected to
have been the most up-to-date and efficient steam craft afloat. There
has ever been displayed in the royal steam yachts far more of the
Admiralty influence of yesterday than of the modern factors at work
in yacht-design. Grace and delicacy have been avoided for a kind of
clumsy impressiveness, and the worst features of the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries naval architecture are retained with a
surprising obstinacy. The heavy quarters and counter, the tasteless
display of external carving and gold leaf have had to make a
pretence of affording what should have come spontaneously from
the beauty of the vessel’s own lines. The Victoria and Albert,
launched a few years ago, is especially expressive of the defects
which she ought never to have exhibited. And the latest English royal
yacht which was launched in 1907, has but little character that is
superior to her predecessor. This Alexandra will be seen at her trials
in the illustration facing page 278. True, the heavy quarters have
been very much modified, but in any assemblage of steam yachts or
modern ocean-going steamships, she stands out less owing to her
inherent beauty, than for the impression of solidity which she
conveys. The Alexandra has a registered tonnage of 2,157, and is
driven by three turbines.
THE ROYAL YACHT “VICTORIA AND ALBERT.”
THE ROYAL YACHT “ALEXANDRA.”

From a Photograph. By permission of Messrs. A. & J. Inglis, Ltd.
The illustration of the Sagitta, facing page 280, is of particular
interest, for when she appeared in the summer of 1908, she was the
largest steam yacht ever built on the south coast. Constructed by
Messrs. Camper and Nicholson for the Duc de Valençay, she has a
Thames measurement tonnage of 757, and on her trials showed a
speed of 15·2 knots, which was 2·2 knots above that contracted for.
Steam yacht building has more usually been the work of the northern
yards. Two of her features are especially noticeable as showing a
divergence from the stereotyped design of the steam yacht. Firstly,
the three, and even two, masts, have gone altogether, and only one
is retained, in a most unusual position, for signalling purposes.
Secondly, her stern goes right away from the accepted clipper-bow-
plus-bowsprit end, although the yacht-like overhanging counter is
retained. In matters of this nature personal taste will enter quite
independent of the demands put forward by naval architecture, but it
can scarcely be said that this hybrid arrangement makes for beauty,
for the nice balance which is so significant a feature of the ends of a
yacht is here hardly possible. Much more acceptable is the design of
the Triad, which, amid considerable adverse criticism for her
originality, made her appearance in the summer of 1909. An
interesting photograph of this novel yacht appears opposite page
280, but it conveys little idea of her size. With her two funnels, her
straight stern and modified turtle-deck stern, she is a “whole-hogger”
as compared with the compromise which the Sagitta represents. In
the Triad the steam yacht breaks right away from accepted
conditions and shows the first real approach to the contemporary
ocean-going steamship. To some extent, no doubt, she exhibits
some resemblance to the well-known German Imperial steam yacht,
the Hohenzollern, but she is rather a deep-sea liner in miniature,
capable of going anywhere, and performing practically any service
which could be asked of her. She has been built on steamship lines
by a firm which, I believe, had never previously constructed a steam
yacht. Her size of 1,416 tons would alone make her interesting, but it
is her business-like appearance which causes her to be especially
noticeable. Her stem has come in for a good deal of criticism, some
of which is doubtless justifiable, but not a little is obviously based on
the fact that convention was thrown aside. It is claimed that the
clipper-stem is not merely advantageous in regard to looks, but
besides giving increased deck space where it is needed to work the
anchors, permits of a generous amount of flare to protect the fore
decks from water coming aboard. The older form also provides a
useful “false” end in the case of a ship colliding, while, on the other
hand, the straight stem possesses considerable merits for docking
and berthing in a congested harbour.
The Triad measures 250 feet long, between perpendiculars, and
35 feet wide, and is equipped with twin-screw engines, which give
her a speed of 16 knots. She has two double-ended boilers, and one
auxiliary boiler for driving the electric installation when in port. Some
of her minor features are sufficiently unusual to merit remark. Thus,
for instance, the windlass on her forecastle is fitted with a special
indicator which shows the amount of cable run out, and an
arrangement something similar in principle to that mentioned as
existing on liners is installed, whereby the engineer cannot easily
make a mistake in carrying out the captain’s orders from the bridge.
If the engines are going ahead the captain knows this by an electric
lamp which shows red; if they are going astern the lamp shows
green, the movement of the engines themselves indicating
automatically. In matters of personal comfort this miniature liner is
amply fitted. Besides the usual accommodation, she has dining-
room, drawing-room, music-room, maids’ room and ample
bedrooms, all upholstered and furnished with due regard to modern
luxury.
It would be impossible within the limits of our subject to refer in
detail to all those magnificent stately steam yachts which are afloat
in European and American waters. Such vessels as the Vanadis,
with her 1,233 tons (Thames measurement), triple-screws and triple
turbines built in 1908; the well-known Ioland, built for Mr. Morton F.
Plant of New York, by a Scotch firm; the Wakiva, twin-screw steam
yacht, the Lysistrata, the Liberty, are representative of the
magnificent fleet which has come into being so speedily, in spite of
the chilly reception and opposition which greeted the steam yacht
during the first half of the past century. The Liberty, something of
whose internal comfort we shall show in another chapter, is of 1,571

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The Psychology of Foreign Policy 1st

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Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology

Cover illustration: Blackout Concepts/Alamy Stock Photo

This book focuses on the role of psychological theories in Interna-

the reliability and validity of research methodology and data-gathering,

Tromsø, Norway Christer Pursiainen

1 Why Does Psychology Matter in International

Two Stages of Decision-Making 63

6 Emotional Decisions 209

8 Relations of Trust and Mistrust 299

Dr. Christer Pursiainen is Professor of Societal Security at the Arctic

Dr. Tuomas Forsberg is Director of the Helsinki Collegium for

senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs;

Fig. A.1 ‘Bounded rationality’, ‘poliheuristic theory’, and ‘prospect

Table 1.1 Psychology as a causal factor in foreign policy

Why Does Psychology Matter in International

How remiss would it be to claim that international politics, which is

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

The research remit of the current book is twofold. First, we aim to

Explaining and Understanding

their explanatory elements, into a more comprehensive problem-solving

If effective reasons are chosen, there is always an aspect of underdetermi-

and their properties. Such an ontology is associated with behaviorism in

Agent and Structure

However, if the idea of mutual constitution is taken too far, we face

it” (Wendt, 1992) idea of structuration in the rather immature disci-

International Relations Grand

Comparing or Combining Theories?

can overcome the cooperation problems that structural realism envis-

What Do Grand Theories Say About Psychology?

Psychology as a Causal Factor in Foreign Policy Decision-Making

baseline. It is one thing to argue that there are psychological mecha-

Table 1.1 Psychology as a causal factor in foreign policy decision-making

Structure Agency Outcome

The international system

the independent and dependent variables. This becomes a heuristically

effect on the value of the dependent variable; like the characteristics

can explain the similarity or difference in outcomes, in relation to known

Foreign Policy Analysis and Psychology

Several research projects were conducted in this spirit. One of the

in IR reflects the growing prominence of psychological approaches in

have had to focus on a limited number of psychological theories in order

BEAM ENGINE OF AN AMERICAN RIVER STEAMER.

AN AMERICAN “WHALE-BACK” STEAMER.

THE RUSSIAN IMPERIAL YACHT “LIVADIA.”

THE ROYAL YACHT “ALEXANDRA.”

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