Face-to-face diplomacy has long been the lynchpin of international politics, yet it has largely been dismissed as irrelevant in theories of cooperation and conflict-as "cheap talk" because leaders have incentives to dissemble+ However, diplomats and leaders have argued for years that there is often no substitute for personally meeting a counterpart to hash out an agreement+ This article argues that faceto-face diplomacy provides a signaling mechanism that increases the likelihood of cooperation+ Face-to-face meetings allow individuals to transmit information and empathize with each other, thereby reducing uncertainty, even when they have strong incentives to distrust the other+ The human brain has discrete architecture and processes devoted to parsing others' intentions via cues in face-to-face interaction+ These processes enable actors to directly access the intentions of others with a higher degree of certainty than economic and game-theoretic models of bargaining predict+ Face-to-face diplomacy has long been the lynchpin of international politics+ Leaders and diplomats throughout the modern period have described the virtues of personally sitting down with partners and adversaries, both in peace and in conflict, in order to better understand each other+ 1 Yet scholars of international relations IR! have largely been pessimistic about such activities+ As Sanders suggests, "personal diplomacy, whether practiced by Franklin D+ Roosevelt with the cool dis-

Bringing together psychological approaches to empathy with research on public preferences for foreign development aid, we shed light on the role empathy plays in global helping behavior. We argue individuals combine their affective empathic responses with situational factors when forming foreign aid preferences. Testing our theory with two novel experiments embedded in a national survey of US citizens, we find that affective empathy not only predicts the individual variation in foreign aid preferences but also explains why Americans weigh aid effectiveness and recipient deservingness—the two important situational aspects of foreign aid—differently. We show that the ability to feel others’ pain is what facilitates global helping behavior, not simply knowing their pain. However, even though this affective ability moderates the impact of aid effectiveness, it amplifies that of recipient merit. Our results contribute to a richer understanding of when empathy facilitates public support for foreign development aid and add to the burgeoning research program on behavioral international politics.

While heterogeneity exists in the degree of agreement between objective and patient perceived assessments of ED crowding, in our study we observed that higher degrees of ED crowding at admission might be associated with lower real-time patient satisfaction.

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