Dissonance and decision-making mistakes in the age of risk

Abstract

Scholars of public and foreign policy have emphasized the role of decision processes in the creation of policy failures and fiascoes and have demonstrated the importance that psychological factors play in policy mistakes. Using Ulrich Beck's notion of world risk society and drawing on advances in our understanding of a key psychological factor central to decision-making pathologies -cognitive dissonance -this article explores the ways in which features of the risk era could alter important decision dynamics and increase decision-making mistakes. In combination with the catastrophic potential of world risk society, this would suggest an increase in the frequency of policymaking fiascoes. Bridging the gap between the "macro" conditions of globalisation and the "micro" processes of decision-making also challenges our conception of both the nature and sources of policymaking mistakes and suggests that our scholarly understanding of "decision-making mistakes" may need rethinking.

Studying fiascos: bringing public and foreign policy together

“…For scholarship in the public policy tradition, the implication is to put more attention on international and transnational sources of policy fiascos. For example, this may shed new light on the roles of uncertainty, complexity and risk as important contexts of such fiascos (Beasley 2016;Meyer 2016). Broadening public policy research out to the international arena might also add to recent efforts at explaining the persistence of policy fiascos (Howlett et al 2015) -for example, by emphasizing international and transnational sources of path dependency or obstacles to policy learning (Kruck 2016).…”

“…However, scholarship into public policy fiascos has often failed to explore causal factors on the level of individual decisionmakers. To redress this imbalance, public policy research can benefit from the rich toolbox in foreign policy for understanding the influence of the personalities and cognitions of key individuals in positions of policy-making authority (Beasley 2016;Brummer 2016). At the same time, focusing explanations of policy fiascos squarely on failures of decision-makers risks masking broader structural contexts which may systematically provoke such failures (Gaskarth 2016).…”

Foreign Policy in the Fourth Dimension (FP4D): Locating Time in Decision-Making

“…Scholars applying cognitive dissonance theory to the study of foreign policymaking build on the idea of "consistency" or the relative consonance between two or more cognitions (beliefs) (Jervis 1976;Larson 1985;Beasley 2016). Dissonance describes the aversive feeling that arises within the individual due to inconsistencies in their experiences of and beliefs about the world, the self, and behaviours.…”

Covert action failure and fiasco construction: William Hague’s 2011 Libyan venture

“…First, scholars of International Relations and Foreign Policy Analysis have long been interested in the impact of various agentoriented factors (see Brummer 2016;Beasley 2016;Allison and Zelikow 1999) on decisions affecting international politics -and crucially how policy-makers learn lessons from these episodes (see Daddow 2011;Howlett 2012;Mumford 2015;Cormac et al 2016). However, and this is especially the case for those studying covert action, scholars have not yet travelled very far down the road of conceptualizing and categorizing analytically all the different types of mistake/blunder/failure/fiasco (for an attempt using US cases see Walker and Malici 2011).…”