¹ See, for example, Holsti, Ole, North, Robert, and Brody, Richard, “Perception and Action in the 1914 Crisis,” in Singer, J. David, ed., Quantitative International Politics (New York 1968)Google Scholar. For a fuller discussion of the Stanford content analysis studies and the general problems of quantification, see my “The Costs of the Quantitative Study of International Relations,” in Klaus Knorr and James N. Rosenau, eds., Contending Approaches to International Politics (forthcoming).

² See, for example, , Osgood, An Alternative to War or Surrender (Urbana 1962)Google Scholar; , Etzioni, The Hard Way to Peace (New York 1962)Google Scholar; , Boulding, “National Images and International Systems,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, iii (June 1959), 120–31Google Scholar; and , Singer, Deterrence, Arms Control, and Disarmament (Columbus 1962)Google Scholar.

³ Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (Pittsburgh 1960)Google Scholar and Arms and Insecurity (Chicago 1960)Google Scholar. For nonmathematicians a fine summary of Richardson's work is Anatol Rapoport's “L. F. Richardson's Mathematical Theory of War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1 (September 1957), 249–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ See Green, Philip, Deadly Logic (Columbus 1966)Google Scholar; , Green, “Method and Substance in the Arms Debate,” World Politics, xvi (July 1964), 642–67Google Scholar; and Levine, Robert A., “Fact and Morals in the Arms Debate,” World Politics, xiv (January 1962), 239–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ See Rapoport, Anatol, Strategy and Conscience (New York 1964)Google Scholar.

⁶ Allport, Floyd, Theories of Perception and the Concept of Structure (New York 1955), 382Google Scholar; Holsti, Ole, “Cognitive Dynamics and Images of the Enemy,” in Finlay, David, Holsti, Ole, and Fagen, Richard, Enemies in Politics (Chicago 1967), 70Google Scholar.

⁷ Bruner, Jerome and Postman, Leo, “On the Perceptions of Incongruity: A Paradigm,” in Bruner, Jerome and Krech, David, eds., Perception and Personality (Durham, N.C., 1949), 210Google Scholar.

⁸ Abelson, Robert and Rosenberg, Milton, “Symbolic Psychologic,” Behavioral Science, iii (January 1958), 4–5Google Scholar.

⁹ P. 27.

¹⁰ Ibid., 2.6.

¹¹ I have borrowed this phrase from Abraham Kaplan, who uses it in a different but related context in The Conduct of Inquiry (San Francisco 1964), 86Google Scholar.

¹² The spiral theorists are not the only ones to ignore the limits of empiricism. Roger Hilsman found that most consumers and producers of intelligence felt that intelligence should not deal with hypotheses, but should only provide the policy-makers with “all the facts” (Strategic Intelligence and National Decisions [Glencoe 1956], 46Google Scholar). The close interdependence between hypotheses and facts is overlooked partly because of the tendency to identify “hypotheses” with “policy preferences.”

¹³ Karl Deutsch interestingly discusses a related question when he argues, “Autonomy … requires both intake from the present and recall from memory, and selfhood can be seen in just this continuous balancing of a limited present and a limited past. … No further self-determination is possible if either openness or memory is lost … To the extent that [systems cease to be able to take in new information], they approach the behavior of a bullet or torpedo: their future action becomes almost completely determined by their past. On the other hand, a person without memory, an organization without values or policy … —all these no longer steer, but drift: their behavior depends little on their past and almost wholly on their present. Driftwood and the bullet are thus each the epitome of another kind of loss of self-control …” (Nationalism and Social Communication [Cambridge, Mass., 1954], 167–68Google Scholar). Also see Deutsch's The Nerves of Government (New York 1963), 98–109Google Scholar, 200–256. A physicist makes a similar argument: “It is clear that if one is too attached to one's preconceived model, one will miss all radical discoveries. It is amazing to what degree one may fail to register mentally an observation which does not fit the initial image. … On die other hand, if one is too open-minded and pursues every hitherto unknown phenomenon, one is almost certain to lose oneself in trivia” (Deutsch, Martin, “Evidence and Inference in Nuclear Research,” in Lerner, Daniel, ed., Evidence and Inference [Glencoe 1958], 102Google Scholar).

¹⁴ Bauer, Raymond, “Problems of Perception and the Relations Between the U.S. and the Soviet Union,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, v (September 1961), 223–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Quoted in Beveridge, W. I. B., The Art of Scientific Investigation, 3rd ed. (London 1957). 50Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Science, Faith, and Society (Chicago 1964), 31Google Scholar. For a further discussion of this problem, see Ibid., 16, 26–41, 90–94; , Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (London 1958), 8–15Google Scholar, 30, 143–68, 269–98, 310–11; Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolution (Chicago 1964)Google Scholar; , Kuhn, “The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research,” in Crombie, A. C., ed., Scientific Change (New York 1963), 344–69Google Scholar; the comments on Kuhn's paper by Hall, Polanyi, and Toulmin, and Kuhn's reply, Ibid., 370–95. For a related discussion of these points from a different perspective, see Storer, Norman, The Social System of Science (New York 1960), 116–22Google Scholar.

¹⁷ “He found that the position of one star relative to others … had shifted. Lalande was a good astronomer and knew that such a shift was unreasonable. He crossed out his first observation, put a question mark next to the second observation, and let the matter go” (Bruner, Jerome, Goodnow, Jacqueline, and Austin, George, A Study of Thinking [New York 1962], 105Google Scholar).

¹⁸ The Structure of Scientific Revolution, 79.

¹⁹ Ibid., 150–51.

²⁰ Requirements of effective political leadership may lead decision-makers to voice fewer doubts than they have about existing policies and images, but this constraint can only partially explain this phenomenon. Similar calculations of political strategy may contribute to several of the hypotheses discussed below.

²¹ P. 221. Similarly, in experiments dealing with his subjects' perception of other people, Charles Dailey found that “premature judgment appears to make new data harder to assimilate than when the observer withholds judgment until all data are seen. It seems probable … that the observer mistakes his own inferences for facts” (“The Effects of Premature Conclusion Upon the Acquisition of Understanding of a Person,” Journal of Psychology, xxx [January 1952], 149–50Google Scholar). For other theory and evidence on this point, see , Bruner, “On Perceptual Readiness,” Psychological Review, LXIV (March 1957), 123–52Google Scholar; Davidson, Gerald, “The Negative Effects of Early Exposure to Suboptimal Visual Stimuli,” Journal of Personality, xxxii (June 1964), 278–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Myers, Albert, “An Experimental Analysis of a Tactical Blunder,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, LXIX (November 1964), 493–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wyatt, Dale and Campbell, Donald, “On the Liability of Stereotype or Hypothesis,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, XLIV (October 1950), 496–500Google Scholar. It should be noted that this tendency makes “incremental” decision-making more likely (Braybrooke, David and Lindblom, Charles, A Strategy of Decision [New York 1963]Google Scholar), but the results of this process may lead the actor further from his goals.

²² For a use of this concept in political communication, see Wohlstetter, Roberta, Pearl Harbor (Stanford 1962)Google Scholar.

²³ Similarly, Robert Coulondre, the French ambassador to Berlin in 1939, was one of the few diplomats to appreciate the Nazi threat. Partly because of his earlier service in the USSR, “he was painfully sensitive to the threat of a Berlin-Moscow agreement. He noted with foreboding that Hitler had not attacked Russia in his Reichstag address of April 28. … So it went all spring and summer, the ambassador relaying each new evidence of the impending diplomatic revolution and adding to his admonitions his pleas for decisive counteraction” (Ford, Franklin and Schorske, Carl, “The Voice in the Wilderness: Robert Coulondre,” in Craig, Gordon and Gilbert, Felix, eds., The Diplomats, Vol. III [New York 1963] 573–74Google Scholar). His hypotheses were correct, but it is difficult to detect differences between the way he and those ambassadors who were incorrect, like Neville Henderson, selectively noted and interpreted information. However, to the extent that the fear of war influenced the appeasers' perceptions of Hitler's intentions, the appeasers' views did have an element of psycho-logic that was not present in their opponents' position.

²⁴ See, for example, Campbell, Donald, “Systematic Error on the Part of Human Links in Communications Systems,” Information and Control, 1 (1958), 346–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Postman, Leo, “The Experimental Analysis of Motivational Factors in Perception,” in Brown, Judson S., ed., Current Theory and Research in Motivation (Lincoln, Neb., 1953) 59–108Google Scholar.

²⁵ Wyatt, Dale and Campbell, Donald, “A Study of Interviewer Bias as Related to Interviewer's Expectations and Own Opinions,” International Journal of Opinion and Attitude Research, iv (Spring 1950), 77–83Google Scholar.

²⁶ Jacobson, Max, The Diplomacy of the Winter War (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 136–39Google Scholar.

²⁷ Aron, Raymond, Peace and War (Garden City 1966), 29Google Scholar.

²⁸ Cf. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, 65. A fairly high degree of knowledge is needed before one can state precise expectations. One indication of the lack of international relations theory is that most of us are not sure what “naturally” flows from our theories and what constitutes either “puzzles” to be further explored with the paradigm or “anomalies” that cast doubt on the basic theories.

²⁹ See Selznick, Philip, Leadership in Administration (Evanston 1957)Google Scholar.

³⁰ Schiff, Ashley, Fire and Water: Scientific Heresy in the Forest Service (Cambridge, Mass., 1962)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Despite its title, this book is a fascinating and valuable study.

³¹ The Craft of Intelligence (New York 1963), 53Google Scholar.

³² P. 302. See Beveridge, 93, for a discussion of the idea that the scientist should keep in mind as many hypotheses as possible when conducting and analyzing experiments.

³³ Presidential Power (New York 1960)Google Scholar.

³⁴ Most psychologists argue that this influence also holds for perception of shapes. For data showing that people in different societies differ in respect to their predisposition to experience certain optical illusions and for a convincing argument that this difference can be explained by the societies' different physical environments, which have led their people to develop different patterns of drawing inferences from ambiguous visual cues, see Segall, Marshall, Campbell, Donald, and Herskovits, Melville, The Influence of Culture on Visual Perceptions (Indianapolis 1966)Google Scholar.

³⁵ Thus when Bruner and Postman's subjects first were presented with incongruous playing cards (i.e., cards in which symbols and colors of the suits were not matching, producing red spades or black diamonds), long exposure times were necessary for correct identification. But once a subject correctly perceived the card and added this type of card to his repertoire of categories, he was able to identify other incongruous cards much more quickly. For an analogous example—in this case, changes in the analysis of aerial reconnaissance photographs of an enemy's secret weapons-testing facilities produced by the belief that a previously unknown object may be present—see Irving, David, The Mare's Nest (Boston 1964), 66–67Google Scholar, 274–75.

³⁶ Bruner and Postman, 220.

³⁷ The Liberal Tradition in America (New York 1955), 306Google Scholar.

³⁸ Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (New York 1962), 142–43Google Scholar.

³⁹ Dearborn, DeWitt and Simon, Herbert, “Selective Perception: A Note on the Departmental Identification of Executives,” Sociometry, xxi (June 1958), 140–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁰ “Two American Ambassadors: Bullitt and Kennedy,” in Craig and Gilbert, 358–59.

⁴¹ Hugh Trevor-Roper puts this point well: “Brought up as a business man, successful in municipal politics, [Chamberlain's] outlook was entirely parochial. Educated Conservative aristocrats like Churchill, Eden, and Cranborne, whose families had long been used to political responsibility, had seen revolution and revolutionary leaders before, in their own history, and understood them correctly; but the Chamberlains, who had run from radical imperialism to timid conservatism in a generation of life in Birmingham, had no such understanding of history or the world: to them the scope of human politics was limited by their own parochial horizons, and Neville Chamberlain could not believe that Hitler was fundamentally different from himself. If Chamberlain wanted peace, so must Hitler” (“Munich—Its Lessons Ten Years Later,” in Loewenheim, Francis, ed., Peace or Appeasement? [Boston 1965], 152–53Google Scholar). For a similar view see Rowse, A. L., Appeasement (New York 1963), 117Google Scholar.

But Donald Lammers points out that the views of many prominent British public figures in the 1930's do not fit this generalization (Explaining Munich [Stanford 1966], 13–140Google Scholar). Furthermore, arguments that stress the importance of the experiences and views of the actors' ancestors do not explain the links by which these influence the actors themselves. Presumably Churchill and Chamberlain read the same history books in school and had the same basic information about Britain's past role in the world. Thus what has to be demonstrated is that in their homes aristocrats like Churchill learned different things about politics and human nature than did middle-class people like Chamberlain and that these experiences had a significant impact. Alternatively, it could be argued that the patterns of child-rearing prevalent among the aristocracy influenced the children's personalities in a way that made them more likely to see others as aggressive.

⁴² Ibid., 15.

⁴³ During a debate on appeasement in the House of Commons, Harold Nicolson declared, “I know that those of us who believe in the traditions of our policy, … who believe that one great function of diis country is to maintain moral standards in Europe, to maintain a settled pattern of international relations, not to make friends with people who are demonstrably evil … —I know that those who hold such beliefs are accused of possessing the Foreign Office mind. I thank God that I possess the Foreign Office mind” (quoted in Gilbert, Martin, The Roots of Appeasement [New York 1966], 187Google Scholar). But the qualities Nicolson mentions and applauds may be related to a more basic attribute of “the Foreign Office mind”—suspiciousness.

⁴⁴ Monger, George, The End of Isolation (London 1963)Google Scholar. I am also indebted to Frederick Collignon for his unpublished manuscript and several conversations on this point.

⁴⁵ Toch, Hans and Schulte, Richard, “Readiness to Perceive Violence as a Result of Police Training,” British Journal of Psychology, LII (November 1961), 392Google Scholar (original italics omitted). It should be stressed that one cannot say whether or not the advanced police students perceived the pictures “accurately.” The point is that their training predisposed them to see violence in ambiguous situations. Whether on balance they would make fewer perceptual errors and better decisions is very hard to determine. For an experiment snowing that training can lead people to “recognize” an expected stimulus even when that stimulus is in fact not shown, see Goldiamond, Israel and Hawkins, William F., “Vexierversuch: The Log Relationship Between Word-Frequency and Recognition Obtained in the Absence of Stimulus Words,” Journal of Experimental Psychology, LVI (December 1958), 457–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁶ A World Restored (New York 1964), 2–3Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Strategic Surrender (New York 1964), 215–41Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ The Power of Small States (Chicago 1959), 81Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Inge, William, Outspoken Essays, First Series (London 1923), 88Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Of course, analogies themselves are not “unmoved movers.” The interpretation of past events is not automatic and is informed by general views of international relations and complex judgments. And just as beliefs about the past influence the present, views about the present influence interpretations of history. It is difficult to determine the degree to which the United States' interpretation of die reasons it went to war in 1917 influenced American foreign policy in the 1920's and 1930's and how much the isolationism of that period influenced the histories of the war.

⁵¹ For some psychological experiments on this subject, see Bruner, Jerome and Minturn, A. Leigh, “Perceptual Identification and Perceptual Organization” Journal of General Psychology, LIII (July 1955), 22–28Google Scholar; Feshbach, Seymour and Singer, Robert, “The Effects of Fear Arousal and Suppression of Fear Upon Social Perception,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, LV (November 1957), 283–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sippoal, Elsa, “A Group Study of Some Effects of Preparatory Sets,” Psychology Monographs, XLVI, No. 210 (1935), 27–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a general discussion of the importance of the perceiver's evoked set, see Postman, 87.

⁵² Pp. 73–74.

⁵³ For example, Roger Hilsman points out, “Those who knew of the peripheral reconnaissance nights that probed Soviet air defenses during the Eisenhower administration and the U-2 flights over the Soviet Union itself … were better able to understand some of the things the Soviets were saying and doing than people who did not know of these activities” (To Move a Nation [Garden City 1967], 66Google Scholar). But it is also possible that those who knew about the U-2 flights at times misinterpreted Soviet messages by incorrectly believing that the sender was influenced by, or at least knew of, these flights.

⁵⁴ I am grateful to Thomas Schelling for discussion on this point

⁵⁵ Deterrence Before Hiroshima (New York 1966), 105–22Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Ibid.

⁵⁷ For a slightly different formulation of this view, see Holsti, 27.

⁵⁸ The Soviets consciously hold an extreme version of this view and seem to believe that nothing is accidental. See the discussion in Leites, Nathan, A Study of Bolshevism (Glencoe 1953), 67–73Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ A. W. Marshall criticizes Western explanations of Soviet military posture for failing to take this into account. See his “Problems of Estimating Military Power,” a paper presented at the 1966 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 16.

⁶⁰ It has also been noted that in labor-management disputes both sides may be apt to believe incorrectly that the other is controlled from above, either from the international union office or from the company's central headquarters (Blake, Robert, Shepard, Herbert, and Mouton, Jane, Managing Inter group Conflict in Industry [Houston 1964], 182Google Scholar). It has been further noted that both Democratic and Republican members of the House tend to see the other party as the one that is more disciplined and united (Clapp, Charles, The Congressman [Washington 1963], 17–19Google Scholar).

⁶¹ Kennan, George, Russia Leaves the War (New York 1967), 484Google Scholar.

⁶² Ibid., 404, 408, 500.

⁶³ Herbert Butterfield notes that these assumptions can contribute to the spiral of “Hobbesian fear. … You yourself may vividly feel the terrible fear that you have of the other party, but you cannot enter into the other man's counter-fear, or even understand why he should be particularly nervous. For you know that you yourself mean him no harm, and that you want nothing from him save guarantees for your own safety; and it is never possible for you to realize or remember properly that since he cannot see the inside of your mind, he can never have the same assurance of your intentions that you have” (History and Human Conflict [London 1951], 20Google Scholar).

⁶⁴ European Diplomatic History 1871–1932 (New York 1933), 125Google Scholar. It takes great mental effort to realize that actions which seem only the natural consequence of defending your vital interests can look to others as though you are refusing them any chance of increasing their influence. In rebutting the famous Crowe “balance of power” memorandum of 1907, which justified a policy of “containing” Germany on the grounds that she was a threat to British national security, Sanderson, a former permanent undersecretary in the Foreign Office, wrote, “It has sometimes seemed to me that to a foreigner reading our press the British Empire must appear in the light of some huge giant sprawling all over the globe, with gouty fingers and toes stretching in every direction, which cannot be approached without eliciting a scream” (quoted in Monger, 315). But few other Englishmen could be convinced that others might see them this way.

⁶⁵ George Kennan makes clear that in 1918 this kind of difficulty was partly responsible for the inability of either the Allies or the new Bolshevik government to understand the motivations of the other side: “There is … nothing in nature more egocentrical than the embattled democracy. … It … tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision of everything else. … It will readily be seen that people who have got themselves into this frame of mind have little understanding for the issues of any contest other than the one in which they are involved. The idea of people wasting time and substance on any other issue seems to them preposterous” (Russia and the West, n-12).

⁶⁶ Kaplan, 89.

⁶⁷ Johan Jorgen Hoist, “Surprise, Signals, and Reaction: The Attack on Norway,” Cooperation and Conflict, No. 1 (1966), 34. The Germans made a similar mistake in November 1942 when they interpreted the presence of an Allied convoy in the Mediterranean as confirming their belief that Malta would be resupplied. They thus were taken by surprise when landings took place in North Africa (Langer, William, Our Vichy Gamble [New York 1966], 365Google Scholar).