The Damocles Delusion: The Sense of Power Inflates Threat Perception in World Politics

Abstract

How does power affect threat perception? Drawing on advances in psychological research on power, I find that the sense of state power inflates the perception of threats. The sense of power activates intuitive thinking in the decision-making process, including a reliance on gut feelings and cognitive shortcuts like heuristics and prior beliefs. In turn, as psychological IR research shows, these mechanisms tend to inflate threat perception. The powerful assess threats from the gut rather than the head. Experimental evidence from the US and China, a reanalysis of a survey of Russian elites, and a large-scale text analysis of Cold War US foreign policy elites lend support to this expectation. The findings help to psychologically reconcile enduring theoretical puzzles—from “underbalancing” to “overextension”—and generate entirely new ones, like the possibility that decision makers of rising, not declining, states feel more fear. Together, the paper offers a “first image reversed” challenge to bottom-up accounts of psychological IR. Decision-maker psychology is also a dependent variable shaped by the balance of power, with important implications for a world returning to great power competition.