Building from the Brain: Advancing the Study of Threat Perception in International Relations
International Organization (forthcoming), working paper version (June 2024), appendix
“Threat perception” is frequently invoked as a causal variable in theories of international relations and foreign policy decision-making. Yet haphazard conceptualization and untested psychological assumptions leave threat perception’s causal effects poorly understood. In this article, I propose a unified solution to these two related problems: taking the brain into account. I first show that this approach solves the conceptualization problem by generating two distinct concepts that generalize across existing theories, align with plain language, and are associated with specific brain-level processes: threat-as-danger perception (subjectively apprehending danger from any source) and threat-as-signal perception (detecting a statement of the intention to harm). Because both types of perception occur in the brain, large-scale neuroimaging data capturing these processes offers a way to empirically test some of the psychological assumptions embedded in IR theories. I conduct two such tests using assumptions from the literatures on conflict decision-making (A1: “harms are costs”) and on coercion (A2: “intentions are inscrutable”). Based on an original analysis of 15 coordinate-based meta-analyses (CBMAs) comprising 500+ studies and 11,000+ subjects, I conclude that these assumptions are inconsistent with the cumulative evidence about how the brain responds to threats of either kind. Further, I show that brain-level data illuminate aspects of threat perception’s impact on behavior that have not yet been integrated into IR theory. Advancing the study of threat perception thus requires a microfoundational approach that builds from what we know about the brain.
Political preferences and threat perception: opportunities for neuroimaging and developmental research
Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 34 (2020) with Rebecca Saxe
People have preferences for how their social environment is organized and governed. One influential explanation of variation in these preferences focuses on individual differences in sensitivity to threats. Recent research demonstrates that this relationship is not only a function of the degree of sensitivity (greater or lesser), but also of the danger in question (i.e., immigration or climate change) and the kind of potential harm it poses (i.e., physical pain or contamination). Since many political issues are not unambiguously of one kind, the structure of an individual’s reactions to perceived political threats is also uncertain. We argue that future research should (i) use functional neuroimaging to test these structures and (ii) investigate the role of social learning in their transmission.
Effort versus Accuracy: How Well Do We Understand Why Others Perceive Threats?
Working Paper, R&R
Threat perception provokes a range of behavior, from cooperation to conflict. Correctly interpreting others’ behavior, and responding optimally, is thought to be aided by “stepping into their shoes” (i.e., mentalizing) to understand the threats they have perceived. But IR scholarship on the effects of attempting this exercise has yielded mixed findings. One missing component in this research is a clear understanding of the link between effort and accuracy. I use a U.S.-based survey experiment (study N=839; pilot N=297) and a novel analytic approach to study mentalizing accuracy in the domain of threat perception. I find that accurately estimating why someone feels threatened by either climate change or illegal immigration is conditional on sharing a belief in the issue’s overall dangerousness. Similar beliefs about dangerousness are not proxies for shared political identities and accuracy for those with dissimilar beliefs does not exceed chance. Focusing first on the emotional states of those who felt threatened did not significantly improve accuracy. These findings suggest that: (1) effort does not guarantee accuracy in estimating the threats others see; (2) emotion understanding may not be a solution to threat mis-estimation; and (3) misperception can arise from basic task difficulty, even without information constraints or deception.