How Statesmen Think: The Psychology of International Politics

"All of the books I’ve chosen are by amazing authors. There are specific books that I recommend, but in most of the cases if you pick up any other book that these authors wrote you’d find wonderful examples of their thinking as well. This book is Bob Jervis’s most recent volume. He is a political scientist at Columbia University and was my dissertation advisor. Bob put political psychology on the map. His most famous book is Perception and Misperception in International Relations , where he makes the case for the importance of psychological variables in international relations. This book is a compilation and expansion of articles looking at the importance of individual leaders and decision-makers on large-scale outcomes in international relations. It’s a wonderful demonstration of how he thinks through the subtle and nuanced ways that individual decision-making affect large-scale social and political outcomes. The Central Intelligence Agency brought Jervis in to do a post-mortem on the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979. He continued to work with the intelligence community and became one of the senior people involved in the Historical Review Panel, which looks at how analogies influence decision-making. Bob examines how decision-makers are affected by biases. Teeing off the debate about the extent to which former Vice President Cheney attempted to influence the intelligence process in making the case for war in Iraq, he looks at the broader problem of whether you can convey intelligence without bias. If information conforms with your preexisting understanding, you do not subject it to the same level of scrutiny that you apply to information that does not conform with your biases. These are natural and normal human biases which affect how we assess the veracity of any information that comes across our table, including intelligence information. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Bob examines both the politicization of the intelligence, which is very relevant right now, and the underlying psychological biases that can and do affect not just intelligence analysts but all of us when we examine new information, regardless of whether or not we are being subject to external pressure to come to a particular conclusion."