Hawks Become Us: The Sense of Power and Militant Foreign Policy Attitudes

Abstract

How does power shape foreign policy attitudes? Drawing on advances in psychological research on power, I argue that the sense of relative state power explains foreign policy hawkishness. The intuitive sense that “our state” is stronger than “your state” activates militant internationalism, an orientation centered on the efficacy of force and deterrence to achieve state aims. Beyond general orientation towards the world, this sense of power explains discrete attitudes towards pressing security issues, from threat perception in the South China Sea to nuclear weapons use against Iran. Five original surveys across the US, China, and Russia, as well as an experiment fielded on the US public, lend support to these claims. The psychological effects of state power overshadow dispositional traits common in behavioral IR, like individuals’ personalities and moral proclivities. More surprisingly, power changes individuals, making hawks of even the most dovish. Taken together, the paper presents a “first image reversed” challenge to standard bottom-up accounts of foreign policy opinion and offers unique explanatory leverage in a potential era of US decline, China’s rise, and Russian belligerence.

Acknowledgements

For feedback and advice, the author thanks Polina Beliakova, Rick Herrmann, Kara Hooser, Yuji Idomoto, Josh Kertzer, Alex Yu-Ting Lin, David Peterson, Brian Rathbun, Randy Schweller, the anonymous reviewers, and audiences at Ohio State, USC, and ISA 2021. For funding assistance and/or survey space, the author thanks Ohio State’s Program for the Study of Realist Foreign Policy, Dartmouth College’s Dickey Center, USC’s Korean Studies Institute, and Elizabeth Cooksey and Ohio State’s CHRR. For translation assistance, the author is indebted to Evgeniia Iakhnis and Haoming Xiong. Finally, thanks to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Levada Center for sharing their survey data. The paper’s original surveys were deemed exempt by the Institutional Review Boards at The Ohio State University (#2021E0239, #2021E0578, #2022E0350) and Dartmouth College (#00032660).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The data and materials that support the findings of this paper are available on Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MVIVTW

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 For more on this surge of research, see Brian C. Rathbun, “Towards a Dual Process Model of Foreign Policy Ideology,” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 34 (August 2020): 211–16; Joshua D. Kertzer and Dustin Tingley, “Political Psychology in International Relations: Beyond the Paradigms,” Annual Review of Political Science 21, no. 1 (May 2018): 319–39.

2 Joshua D. Kertzer, Kathleen E. Powers, Brian C. Rathbun, and Ravi Iyer, “Moral Support: How Moral Values Shape Foreign Policy Attitudes,” Journal of Politics 76, no. 3 (July 2014): 825–40; Brian C. Rathbun, Joshua D. Kertzer, Jason Reifler, Paul Goren, and Thomas J. Scotto, “Taking Foreign Policy Personally: Personal Values and Foreign Policy Attitudes,” International Studies Quarterly 60, no. 1 (February 2016): 124–37; Timothy B. Gravelle, Jason Reifler, and Thomas J. Scotto, “Personality Traits and Foreign Policy Attitudes: A Cross-National Exploratory Study,” Personality and Individual Differences 153 (January 2020): 109607; Caleb Pomeroy and Brian C. Rathbun, “Just Business? Moral Condemnation and Virtuous Violence in the American and Russian Mass Publics,” Journal of Peace Research (2023), Forthcoming; Sarah Kreps and Sarah Maxey, “Mechanisms of Morality: Sources of Support for Humanitarian Intervention,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 62, no. 8 (2018): 1814-1842.

3 Rathbun, “Towards a Dual Process Model of Foreign Policy Ideology.”

4 Michael Tomz, Jessica L.P. Weeks, and Keren Yarhi-Milo, “Public Opinion and Decisions About Military Force in Democracies,” International Organization 74, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 119–43; Erik Lin-Greenberg, “Soldiers, Pollsters, and International Crises: Public Opinion and the Military’s Advice on the Use of Force,” Foreign Policy Analysis 17, no. 3 (April 8, 2021); Jonathan A. Chu and Stefano Recchia, “Does Public Opinion Affect the Preferences of Foreign Policy Leaders? Experimental Evidence from the UK Parliament,” Journal of Politics 84, no. 3 (July 2022): 1874–77.

5 Beckley, Michael, “The Power of Nations: Measuring What Matters,” International Security 43, no. 2 (November 2018): 7-44.

6 Dacher Keltner, Deborah H. Gruenfeld, and Cameron Anderson, “Power, Approach, and Inhibition,” Psychological Review 110, no. 2 (April 2003): 265–84; Adam D. Galinsky, Derek D. Rucker, and Joe C. Magee, “Power: Past Findings, Present Considerations, and Future Directions,” APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 3: Interpersonal Relations., 2015, 421–60; Ana Guinote, “How Power Affects People: Activating, Wanting, and Goal Seeking,” Annual Review of Psychology 68, no. 1 (January 3, 2017): 353–81.

7 Eugene R. Wittkopf, Faces of Internationalism: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990).

8 First image reversed causation “inverts the analytic focus. . . from micro-micro causation to macro-micro causation: from the effects of actor-level characteristics or individual differences on attitudes and behaviors, to the effects of environmental forces on actor-level characteristics.” Kertzer and Tingley, “Political Psychology in International Relations,” 330. For a first image reversed take on the effects of anarchy, see Brian C. Rathbun and Caleb Pomeroy, “See No Evil, Speak No Evil? Morality, Evolutionary Psychology, and the Nature of International Relations,” International Organization 76, no. 3 (2022): 656-689.

9 For reviews, see Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Stephan Haggard, David A. Lake, and David G. Victor, “The Behavioral Revolution and International Relations,” International Organization 71, no. S1 (April 2017): S1–31; Kertzer and Tingley, “Political Psychology in International Relations”; James W. Davis and Rose McDermott, “The Past, Present, and Future of Behavioral IR,” International Organization 75, no. 1 (September 2020): 147–77.

10 Richard K. Herrmann, Philip E. Tetlock, and Penny S. Visser, “Mass Public Decisions on Go to War: A Cognitive-Interactionist Framework,” American Political Science Review 93, no. 3 (September 1999): 553–73; Rathbun, “Towards a Dual Process Model of Foreign Policy Ideology”; Wittkopf, “Faces of Internationalism”; Ole R. Holsti and James N. Rosenau, “The Structure of Foreign Policy Attitudes among American Leaders,” Journal of Politics 52, no. 1 (February 1990): 94–125.

11 Joshua D. Kertzer and Thomas Zeitzoff, “A Bottom-Up Theory of Public Opinion about Foreign Policy,” American Journal of Political Science 61, no. 3 (June 2017): 543–58.

12 Kertzer et al., “Moral Support”; Rathbun et al., "Taking Foreign Policy Personally."

13 Gravelle et al., “Personality Traits and Foreign Policy Attitudes,” 3.

14 Rathbun, “Towards a Dual Process Model of Foreign Policy Ideology,” 212.

15 For examples, see Christopher Gelpi, “Performing on Cue? The Formation of Public Opinion Toward War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 54, no. 1 (January 2010): 88–116; Daryl G. Press, Scott D. Sagan, and Benjamin A. Valentino, “Atomic Aversion: Experimental Evidence on Taboos, Traditions, and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons,” American Political Science Review 107, no. 1 (February 2013): 188–206; Kertzer et al., “Moral Support”; Rathbun et al., “Taking Foreign Policy Personally”; Scott D. Sagan and Benjamin A. Valentino, “Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran: What Americans Really Think about Using Nuclear Weapons and Killing Noncombatants,” International Security 42, no. 1 (July 2017): 41–79; Alastair Iain Johnston, “Is Chinese Nationalism Rising? Evidence from Beijing,” International Security 41, no. 3 (January 2017): 7–43.

16 See, for example, Herrmann et al., “Mass Public Decisions on Go to War”; Michael Tomz and Jessica L. P. Weeks, “Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace,” American Political Science Review 107, no. 4 (November 2013): 849–65.

17 Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 241.

18 Randall Schweller, “Opposite but Compatible Nationalisms: A Neoclassical Realist Approach to the Future of US–China Relations,” Chinese Journal of International Politics 11, no. 1 (2018): 23–48.

19 See, for example, George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 59; Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), 35; John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001), 25–27.

20 Christopher Fettweis, Psychology of a Superpower: Security and Dominance in US Foreign Policy (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2018).

21 For more on the distinction between macrofoundations and microfoundations, see James W. Davis, “Better than a Bet: Good Reasons for Behavioral and Rational Choice Assumptions in IR Theory,” European Journal of International Relations (2022), Forthcoming.

22 Susan T. Fiske, “Controlling Other People: The Impact of Power on Stereotyping,” American Psychologist 48, no. 6 (1993): 621–28; Susan T. Fiske and Eric Dépret, “Control, Interdependence and Power: Understanding Social Cognition in Its Social Context,” European Review of Social Psychology 7, no. 1 (January 1996): 31–61; Keltner et al., “Power, Approach, and Inhibition.” Note that this paper focuses on the effects of power on human psychology, which is a different question than the individual-level motivations of power-seeking behavior. See David G. Winter “Power in the person: Exploring the Motivational Underground of Power,” in The Social Psychology of Power, eds. Ana Guinote and Theresa K. Vescio (New York: The Guilford Press, 2010), 113–140.

23 Keltner et al., “Power, Approach, and Inhibition,” 265-266; Joe C. Magee and Adam D. Galinsky, “Social Hierarchy: The Self‐Reinforcing Nature of Power and Status,” Academy of Management Annals 2, no. 1 (January 2008): 361; Eric M. Anicich and Jacob B. Hirsh, “The Psychology of Middle Power: Vertical Code-Switching, Role Conflict, and Behavioral Inhibition,” Academy of Management Review 42, no. 4 (October 2017): 662.

24 Beckley, “The Power of Nations”; Therese Anders, Christopher J Fariss, and Jonathan N Markowitz, “Bread Before Guns or Butter: Introducing Surplus Domestic Product (SDP),” International Studies Quarterly 64, no. 2 (April 24, 2020): 392–405.

25 Anicich and Hirsh, “The Psychology of Middle Power,” 622; Cameron Anderson, Oliver P. John, and Dacher Keltner, “The Personal Sense of Power,” Journal of Personality 80, no. 2 (February 2012): 313–316; Ana Guinote, “Behaviour Variability and the Situated Focus Theory of Power,” European Review of Social Psychology 18, no. 1 (November 2007): 259.

26 William C. Wohlforth, “The Perception of Power: Russia in the Pre-1914 Balance,” World Politics 39, no. 3 (April 1987): 353–81.

27 Mianlin Deng, Mufan Zheng, and Ana Guinote, “When Does Power Trigger Approach Motivation? Threats and the Role of Perceived Control in the Power Domain,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 12, no. 5 (May 2018): 2; Keltner et al., “Power, Approach, and Inhibition.”

28 Andrew J. Elliot, ed. Handbook of Approach and Avoidance Motivation (New York, NY: Psychology Press, 2008), 5-6; Jeffrey Alan Gray, The Psychology of Fear and Stress, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

29 Marlon Mooijman, Wilco W. van Dijk, Naomi Ellemers, and Eric van Dijk, “Why Leaders Punish: A Power Perspective,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 109, no. 1 (July 2015): 75-89.

30 Galinsky et al., “Power: Past Findings, Present Considerations, and Future Directions.”

31 Dominic DP Johnson and Dominic Tierney, “The Rubicon Theory of War: How the Path to Conflict Reaches the Point of No Return,” International Security 36, no. 1 (2011): 7-40.

32 Keltner et al., “Power, Approach, and Inhibition.”

33 Leonie Huddy, Stanley Feldman, Charles Taber, and Gallya Lahav, “Threat, Anxiety, and Support of Antiterrorism Policies,” American Journal of Political Science 49, no. 3 (2005): 593-608.

34 Anderson et al., “The Personal Sense of Power.”

35 Adam D. Galinsky, Deborah H. Gruenfeld, and Joe C. Magee, “From Power to Action,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85, no. 3 (2003): 453–66; Cameron Anderson and Adam D. Galinsky, “Power, Optimism, and Risk-Taking,” European Journal of Social Psychology 36, no. 4 (2006): 511–36.

36 Magee and Galinsky, “Social Hierarchy,” 368.

37 Galinsky et al., “From Power to Action”; Nathanael J. Fast and Serena Chen, “When the Boss Feels Inadequate,” Psychological Science 20, no. 11 (November 2009): 1406–13.

38 Eric Dépret and Susan T Fiske, “Perceiving the Powerful: Intriguing Individuals versus Threatening Groups,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 35, no. 5 (September 1999): 465; Walter G. Stephan, Oscar Ybarra, and Kimberly Rios Morrison, “Intergroup Threat Theory,” in Handbook of Prejudice, Stereotyping, and Discrimination, 2^nd ed., ed. Todd D. Nelson (New York: Psychology Press, 2016), 255.

39 Philip J. Corr, “Approach and Avoidance Behaviour: Multiple Systems and Their Interactions,” Emotion Review 5, no. 3 (June 2013): 289.

40 Guinote, “How Power Affects People,” 369.

41 Galinsky et al., “From Power to Action”; Anderson and Galinsky, “Power, Optimism, and Risk-Taking.”

42 Deborah H. Gruenfeld, M. Ena Inesi, Joe C. Magee, and Adam D. Galinsky, “Power and the Objectification of Social Targets,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95, no. 1 (2008): 111-127.

43 Fiske, “Controlling Other People”; Joris Lammers and Diederik A. Stapel, “Power Increases Dehumanization,” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 14, no. 1 (September 2010): 113–26; Adam D. Galinsky, Joe C. Magee, M. Ena Inesi, and Deborah H Gruenfeld, “Power and Perspectives Not Taken,” Psychological Science 17, no. 12 (December 2006): 1068–74.

44 Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner “The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior,” in Political Psychology: Key Readings, eds. John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius (New York: Psychology Press, 2004), 276–293; Stephan et al., “Intergroup Threat Theory”; Richard K. Herrmann, “How Attachments to the Nation Shape Beliefs About the World: A Theory of Motivated Reasoning,” International Organization 71, no. S1 (April 2017): S61–84.

45 Wohlforth, “The Perception of Power.”

46 Joshua D. Kertzer, Brian C. Rathbun, and Nina Srinivasan Rathbun, “The Price of Peace: Motivated Reasoning and Costly Signaling in International Relations,” International Organization 74, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 100.

47 Eugene R. Wittkopf, “Faces of Internationalism in a Transitional Environment,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 38, no. 3 (September 1994): 377.

48 Wittkopf, “Faces of Internationalism in a Transitional Environment,” 377.

49 Wittkopf, “Faces of Internationalism in a Transitional Environment,” 377.

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52 Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 148-149.

53 Zakaria, From Wealth to Power, 149.

54 Zakaria, From Wealth to Power, 149.

55 James D. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49, no. 3 (1995): 384-385.

56 Rose McDermott, Anthony C. Lopez, and Peter K. Hatemi, “‘Blunt Not the Heart, Enrage It’: The Psychology of Revenge and Deterrence,” Texas National Security Review, 1, no. 1 (November 2017): 70.

57 Appendix A1 provides an overview of the surveys.

58 Rathbun, “Towards a Dual Process Model of Foreign Policy Ideology,” 214.

59 Richard K. Herrmann, Pierangelo Isernia, and Paolo Segatti, “Attachment to the Nation and International Relations: Dimensions of Identity and Their Relationship to War and Peace,” Political Psychology 30, no. 5 (October 2009): 721–54; Kertzer et al., “Moral Support.”

60 Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek, “Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96, no. 5 (May 2009): 1029–46.

61 Kertzer et al., “Moral Support.”

62 Appendix A2 presents the full instrumentation for each variable.

63 Beatrice Rammstedt and Oliver P. John, “Measuring Personality in One Minute or Less: A 10-Item Short Version of the Big Five Inventory in English and German,” Journal of Research in Personality 41, no. 1 (February 2007): 203–12; Gravelle et al., “Personality Traits and Foreign Policy Attitudes.”

64 Ingrid Zakrisson, “Construction of a Short Version of the Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) Scale,” Personality and Individual Differences 39, no. 5 (October 2005): 863–72; Rathbun, “Towards a Dual Process Model of Foreign Policy Ideology,” 212.

65 Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

66 Anderson et al., “The Personal Sense of Power.”

67 Appendix A4 presents the full regression tables.

68 Rathbun, “Towards a Dual Process Model of Foreign Policy Ideology.”

69 Kertzer et al., “The Price of Peace.”

70 Joshua D. Kertzer, Ryan Brutger, and Kai Quek, “Perspective Taking and the Security Dilemma: Cross-National Experimental Evidence from China and the United States,” Working Paper.

71 Appendix A6 presents the full regression tables.

72 Dina Smeltz and Lily Wojtowicz, “Russians Say Their Country Is A Rising Military Power; And a Growing Percentage of Americans View Russia as a Threat,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs Report (March 1, 2019), 1-20.

73 Galinsky et al., “Power: Past Findings, Present Considerations, and Future Directions.”

74 Herrmann et al., “Mass Public Decisions on Go to War”; Rathbun, “Towards a Dual Process Model of Foreign Policy Ideology.”

75 Kertzer et al., “Moral Support.”

76 Appendix A5 presents the full regression tables associated with this section’s moderation analyses.

77 Appendix A5 shows similar moderation effects for discrete security attitude DVs. In the US, ideological liberals are more likely to support risky preventive strikes than conservatives prior to war. In China, those lowest in binding foundations (i.e., those who should tend the least hawkish) perceive other states just as threatening in the South China Sea as those highest in binding foundations.

78 Compared to the US adult population, the sample skews slightly younger and more educated. The survey instrument was housed on Qualtrics’s online platform. The sample size was determined by an a priori power analysis for a two-sided comparison with expected effect size of 0.2, α = .05, and power of 0.80; this analysis point to a sample size of N = 393 subjects per condition, or N = 1,179 total.

79 These items were also used in the correlational surveys, namely seven-point scales of (dis)agreement with “Being American is important to how I feel about myself” and “When someone says something bad about American people, it feels as if they said something bad about me.”

80 The results are robust to additive combination, as well.

81 MI means of 15.18 and 15.09, p = 0.75, and sense of power means of 7.57 and 7.32, p < .05, all from t-tests on additive scales. Appendix A8 presents mediation analyses of two possible causal pathways. The sense of power mediates 64.4% of the effect of the treatments on hawkishness (p < .001), whereas hawkishness mediates 5.5% of the effect of the treatments on the sense of power (p < .01). These proportions suggest that hawks might be motivated to evaluate their state as powerful, but far more explanatory work is done by this paper’s suggested process that the sense of power begets hawkishness.

82 Richard K. Herrmann, James F. Voss, Tonya Y. E. Schooler, and Joseph Ciarrochi, “Images in International Relations: An Experimental Test of Cognitive Schemata,” International Studies Quarterly 41, no. 3 (September 1997): 403–33; Rathbun, “Towards a Dual Process Model of Foreign Policy Ideology.”

83 Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China (WW Norton & Company, 2022).

84 Anderson and Galinsky, “Power, Optimism, and Risk-Taking”; M. Ena Inesi, “Power and Loss Aversion,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 112, no. 1 (May 2010): 58–69.

85 Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 14.

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87 Waltz, Theory of International Politics.

88 Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

89 Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (New York: Free Press, 1973), 246; Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War.”

90 Schweller, “Opposite but Compatible Nationalisms,” 25.

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93 Weiss, “The China Trap,” 42.

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Caleb Pomeroy

Caleb Pomeroy is the Diana Davis Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow in US Foreign Policy and International Security at Dartmouth College’s John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, Hanover, New Hampshire.