Who Fights For Reputation

How psychology explains why a leader is willing to use military force to protect or salvage reputation In Who Fights for Reputation, Keren Yarhi-Milo provides an original framework, based on insights from psychology, to explain why some political leaders are more willing to use military force to defend their reputation than others. Rather than focusing on a leader's background, beliefs, bargaining skills, or biases, Yarhi-Milo draws a systematic link between a trait called self-monitoring and foreign policy behavior. She examines self-monitoring among national leaders and advisers and shows that while high self-monitors modify their behavior strategically to cultivate image-enhancing status, low self-monitors are less likely to change their behavior in response to reputation concerns. Exploring self-monitoring through case studies of foreign policy crises during the terms of U.S. presidents Carter, Reagan, and Clinton, Yarhi-Milo disproves the notion that hawks are always more likely than doves to fight for reputation. Instead, Yarhi-Milo demonstrates that a decision maker's propensity for impression management is directly associated with the use of force to restore a reputation for resolve on the international stage. Who Fights for Reputation offers a brand-new understanding of the pivotal influence that psychological factors have on political leadership, military engagement, and the protection of public prestige.

How psychology explains why a leader is willing to use military force to protect or salvage reputation In Who Fights for Reputation, Keren Yarhi-Milo provides an original framework, based on insights from psychology, to explain why some political leaders are more willing to use military force to defend their reputation than others. Rather than focusing on a leader's background, beliefs, bargaining skills, or biases, Yarhi-Milo draws a systematic link between a trait called self-monitoring and foreign policy behavior. She examines self-monitoring among national leaders and advisers and shows that while high self-monitors modify their behavior strategically to cultivate image-enhancing status, low self-monitors are less likely to change their behavior in response to reputation concerns. Exploring self-monitoring through case studies of foreign policy crises during the terms of U.S. presidents Carter, Reagan, and Clinton, Yarhi-Milo disproves the notion that hawks are always more likely than doves to fight for reputation. Instead, Yarhi-Milo demonstrates that a decision maker's propensity for impression management is directly associated with the use of force to restore a reputation for resolve on the international stage. Who Fights for Reputation offers a brand-new understanding of the pivotal influence that psychological factors have on political leadership, military engagement, and the protection of public prestige.

States are more likely to engage in risky and destabilizing actions such as military buildups and preemptive strikes if they believe their adversaries pose a tangible threat. Yet despite the crucial importance of this issue, we don't know enough about how states and their leaders draw inferences about their adversaries' long-term intentions. Knowing the Adversary draws on a wealth of historical archival evidence to shed new light on how world leaders and intelligence organizations actually make these assessments. Keren Yarhi-Milo examines three cases: Britain's assessments of Nazi Germany's intentions in the 1930s, America's assessments of the Soviet Union's intentions during the Carter administration, and the Reagan administration's assessments of Soviet intentions near the end of the Cold War. She advances a new theoretical framework—called selective attention—that emphasizes organizational dynamics, personal diplomatic interactions, and cognitive and affective factors. Yarhi-Milo finds that decision makers don't pay as much attention to those aspects of state behavior that major theories of international politics claim they do. Instead, they tend to determine the intentions of adversaries on the basis of preexisting beliefs, theories, and personal impressions. Yarhi-Milo also shows how intelligence organizations rely on very different indicators than decision makers, focusing more on changes in the military capabilities of adversaries. Knowing the Adversary provides a clearer picture of the historical validity of existing theories, and broadens our understanding of the important role that diplomacy plays in international security.

Political psychology applies what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. It examines how people reach political decisions on topics such as voting, party identification, and political attitudes as well as how leaders mediate political conflicts and make foreign policy decisions. In this updated third edition of The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, Leonie Huddy, David O. Sears, Jack S. Levy, and Jennifer Jerit have gathered together an international group of distinguished scholars to provide an up-to-date account of key topics and areas of research in the field. Chapter authors draw on theory and research on biopsychology, neuroscience, personality, psychopathology, evolutionary psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and intergroup relations. Some chapters address the political psychology of political elites, while other chapters deal with the dynamics of mass political behavior. Focusing first on political psychology at the individual level (attitudes, values, decision-making, ideology, personality) and then moving to the collective (group identity, mass mobilization, political violence), this fully interdisciplinary volume covers models of the mass public and political elites and addresses both domestic issues and foreign policy. Now with new chapters on authoritarianism, nationalism, status hierarchies, minority political identities, and several other topics along with substantially updated material to account for the recent cutting-edge research within both psychology and political science, this is an essential reference for scholars and students interested in the intersection of the two fields.

This book theorizes China's coercion decisions in response to perceived threats to its national security. It leverages empirical evidence, including primary documents and interviews with Chinese and foreign officials and offers policy implications for understanding China's grand strategy, managing China's rise, and avoiding great power conflicts.

There is widespread agreement that status or standing in the international system is a critical element in world politics. The desire for status is recognized as a key factor in nuclear proliferation, the rise of China, and other contemporary foreign policy issues, and has long been implicated in foundational theories of international relations and foreign policy. Despite the consensus that status matters, we lack a basic understanding of status dynamics in international politics. The first book to comprehensively examine this subject, Fighting for Status presents a theory of status dissatisfaction that delves into the nature of prestige in international conflicts and specifies why states want status and how they get it. What actions do status concerns trigger, and what strategies do states use to maximize or salvage their standing? When does status matter, and under what circumstances do concerns over relative position overshadow the myriad other concerns that leaders face? In examining these questions, Jonathan Renshon moves beyond a focus on major powers and shows how different states construct status communities of peer competitors that shift over time as states move up or down, or out, of various groups. Combining innovative network-based statistical analysis, historical case studies, and a lab experiment that uses a sample of real-world political and military leaders, Fighting for Status provides a compelling look at the causes and consequences of status on the global stage.

What do Amazon's product reviews, eBay's feedback score system, Slashdot's Karma System, and Xbox Live's Achievements have in common? They're all examples of successful reputation systems that enable consumer websites to manage and present user contributions most effectively. This book shows you how to design and develop reputation systems for your own sites or web applications, written by experts who have designed web communities for Yahoo! and other prominent sites. Building Web Reputation Systems helps you ask the hard questions about these underlying mechanisms, and why they're critical for any organization that draws from or depends on user-generated content. It's a must-have for system architects, product managers, community support staff, and UI designers. Scale your reputation system to handle an overwhelming inflow of user contributions Determine the quality of contributions, and learn why some are more useful than others Become familiar with different models that encourage first-class contributions Discover tricks of moderation and how to stamp out the worst contributions quickly and efficiently Engage contributors and reward them in a way that gets them to return Examine a case study based on actual reputation deployments at industry-leading social sites, including Yahoo!, Flickr, and eBay