International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   Central to the study of international security is the psychology of strategy. One is in a strategic situation when one's best move depends on the other's move. The objective is to guess what the other will do and to influence that move. Success depends on imagining how someone will behave, not how they ought to behave. As Nobel Prize winning economist and master strategist Thomas Schelling (1960 :162–3; quoted in Jervis 2002 ) put it: “Some essential part of the study of mixed-motive games is necessarily empirical. This is not to say just that it is an empirical question how people do actually perform in mixed-motive games, especially games too complicated for intellectual mastery. It is a stronger statement: that the principles relevant to successful play, the strategic principles, the propositions of a normative theory, cannot be derived by purely analytical means from a priori considerations.” A science of strategy depends on what people believe and what influences them, as well as how they learn, who they think they are, and what they think about others. Successful strategy depends on psychology. This essay reviews four general approaches to the psychology of strategy. The earliest psychological work in security focused on personality. This approach began with Freud and continues today, although it relies on new theories and different techniques. ... log in or subscribe to read full text