My research flips the causal arrow in psychological international relations — investigating the structural and environmental forces that shape human psychology — and develops quantitative methods to facilitate this agenda.
The psychology of power in world politics
My core agenda investigates the psychological consequences of power in international politics, introducing a “first image reversed” approach to international security. This agenda stems from my dissertation at Ohio State, which won the Department of Political Science’s 2022 Henry R. Spencer Award for Best Dissertation and received the Honorable Mention for the 2023 Kenneth N Waltz Award for best dissertation in the field of international security, International Security Section, American Political Science Association.
Behavioral IR typically investigates psychological effects from the “bottom-up,” such as the effects of leaders’ varying personalities or moral proclivities on international outcomes. But, we have overlooked the fact that relative state power — one of the most basic drivers of international politics — changes human psychology from the system-level down. Drawing on psychological research on power, my work finds that the sense of power – the intuitive feeling that “our state” is stronger than “your state” – often works to the detriment of decisionmaker rationality: power paradoxically makes humans worse at power politics.
The cornerstone of the agenda shows that the sense of power inflates threat perception. Leaders of powerful states feel less secure — not despite that power but because of that power — and, perhaps more perniciously, feel an irrational capacity to solve those imagined fears through military force. Beyond state leaders, the effects of power extend straight down to the mass public, providing a systematic explanation for foreign policy hawkishness.
During the current postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford, I am working to convert three standalone papers from the dissertation into a book project on the psychology of power in world politics, tentatively titled Icarus Falls. In addition to this book project, I am also starting a new project on the ways in which possession of nuclear weapons shapes leader psychology.
Moral psychology and the nature of international relations
My second body of top-down psychological work challenges conventional IR’s understanding of the effects of anarchy. Traditionally, international security theory maintains that anarchy – the lack of arbiter above the state – forces leaders to set aside moral concerns to achieve security. Drawing on moral and evolutionary psychology, we argue the opposite: it is not despite anarchy but because of anarchy that humans have a moral sense, allowing us to cooperate within and between large groups, as well as screen for and respond to threats.
Psychological IR in an era of expanding data availability
My methodological agenda develops and applies statistical tools to expand our scholarly ability to measure psychological phenomena “at a distance.” Because world leaders seldom respond to our surveys, I develop word embedding methods to uncover elite perceptions, attitudes, and behavioral tendencies expressed in textual data. A current project in this vein uses all available internal documents in the Foreign Relations of the United States to show that US decisionmakers exhibit higher levels of aggressiveness, threat perception, and racial bias than the broader US public from 1946 to 1980. I find the same results in a re-analysis of a survey of Russian elites and link the effects in both cases to a higher sense of power felt by elites relative to the public.