Reputations in the Wild: Reputation Costs from the Syrian and Crimean Crises Among Leaders and Citizens [Josh Kertzer, Jonathan Renshon & Keren Yarhi-Milo]
While an older conventional wisdom held that reputation was one of “the few things worth fighting for," later work suggested that reputations either didn't matter or possibly exist at all. Though the “reputation cynics" did not carry the day, the appearance of a vibrant debate still persists. We argue that the debate over reputation has been hamstrung by scholars asking and answering entirely different questions about reputations. We introduce a new conceptual framework that divides reputational inferences into the evaluation phase (in which observers update their beliefs about type/attributes) and a diagnostic phase in which in which judgments are made about present and future behavior. We then introduce a new type of evidence into this debate, presenting results from original surveys fielded on four samples (including Israeli decision-makers, Israeli publics, and American IR scholars) to study the evaluation phase in which reputation costs were incurred by various actors as a result of the Russian invasion of Crimea and the Syrian civil war. Our results suggest that reputations costs exist, that they are worse in cases of failed threats, that they attach to both leaders and the countries they represent and that they are perceived similarly by elite leaders and ordinary citizens. Finally, our studies revealed the existence of a “home-away gap": compared to foreign observers, American IR scholars seem to underestimate the magnitude of reputation costs the US has incurred by backing down on threats.
Putting Things in Perspective: Mental Simulation in Experimental Political Science [Josh Kertzer & Jonathan Renshon]
Whether leaders taking the perspective of rivals or allies, student subjects taking the perspective of leaders in lab studies, or citizens taking their own perspective in hypothetical scenarios, most modern IR scholarship draws implicitly on perspective- taking. Unfortunately, several decades of psychological research suggests that individuals vary tremendously in their ability to see the world through others' eyes. We provide a conceptual framework for understanding perspective-taking in IR, focusing on the nature of the "target" (first or third-person) and individuals' inability to adjust from their initial anchor: their own beliefs. Across three experimental studies, we find evidence that perspective-taking exacerbates pre-existing attitudes towards the use of force, making hawks more hawkish and doves more dovish. Perspective-taking thus makes people more like themselves, which raises the prospect that participants are less like themselves in studies that do not take perspective-taking into account.
Praise from Peers Promotes Empathetic Behavior [Adeline Lo, Jonathan Renshon & Lotem Bassan-Nygate]
Empathy is a powerful tool for shaping and shaping policy preferences, encouraging cooperative or inclusionary behavior (Adida, Lo and Platas, 2018), and warming attitudes towards others. Yet, recent work has shown that engaging in empathy is costly. We investigate the magnitude of those costs and their origins—whether emotional or cognitive—and propose and test an intervention designed to lower the barriers to empathy. We begin by verifying the cost of empathy and harnessing an incentive-compatible reservation wage design to estimate a monetary price to the cost in a first study. We then propose peer praise as an effective and light-touch approach to encourage empathetic behavior in a second study, developing an intervention that uses naturalistic peer praise. Our third study uses a randomized survey experiment to demonstrate the efficacy of peer praise in promoting empathy. In our last two randomized survey experiments, we investigate mechanisms and provide evidence that peer praise encourages empathy through an affective pathway by boosting positive emotions. Our discussion centers on findings related to the scope of our intervention’s efficacy and its broad success in motivating empathy across ideological and partisan categories.
The Generalizability of IR Theories Beyond the United States [Lotem Bassan-Nygate, Jonathan Renshon, Jessica Weeks & Chagai Weiss]
Theories of international relations (IR) typically make predictions intended to hold across many countries, yet existing experimental evidence testing their micro-foundations relies overwhelmingly on studies fielded in the U.S. We argue that the nature of what constitutes a theory of IR makes it especially important to know to what extent particular findings hold across countries. To examine the generalizability of IR experimental findings (in terms of direction and significance of effects) beyond the U.S., we implemented a pre-registered and harmonized multi-site replication study, fielding four prominent IR experiments in seven countries: Brazil, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Nigeria, and the U.S. We find high levels of generalizability across our studies, a pattern likely due to treatment effect homogeneity. Overall, we estimate similar treatment effects to the U.S. in a wide range of democracies, offering important theoretical and empirical implications to inform the design and interpretation of future experimental research in IR.
Identity and the Social Construction of Reputation in World Politics
Empathy in Politics [Adeline Lo, Jonathan Renshon & Lotem Bassan-Nygate]
Reputations as Stereotypes [Ryan Powers & Jonathan Renshon]