The Role of Belief Systems and Schemas in Foreign Policy Decision-Making

The roles states play: a Meadian interactionist approach

“…Barnett (1993) illustrates his approach by exploring the impact of the conflicting roles Arab states were called upon to play in the pre-1967 period -those of sovereign state and panArabist state -which derived from the Arab States System. By seeing roles as more than a particular form of belief-system (Little and Smith 1988;Larson 1994) or as foreign policy 'ideas' (Goldstein and Keohane 1993), a critique possible to make of Holsti, but as elements of international institutional structures, the explanatory power of the role concept can thereby be retained.…”

A New Direction for Theory-Building in Intelligence Studies

“…Therefore, schemas encourage theory-driven thinking and prevent complete openness to new information. 40 Revisionists point out that the cognitive shortcuts are not unavoidable. They note, for instance, that more recent psychological research has shown that schemas do change when no other way to account for contradictory data that people consider highly diagnostic is available.…”

“…38 Yet, schemas, once formed, are relatively resistant to change. 39 Schema theory predicts that the schema holder would try to assimilate discrepant information into the existing schema or dismiss it as unimportant or incredible.…”

Der Irakkrieg 2003

“…(Sprout und Sprout, 1957, 314) (Holsti, 1976, 19 (Jervis, 1968;Stein, 1982;Jervis, 2006b). Solche Fehlwahrnehmungen sind aber auch dem Umstand geschuldet, dass Entscheidungsträger auf gewisse "mental sets", "cognitive styles" (Greenstein, 1994, 62) oder Denkschemata (Conover und Feldman, 1984;Welch Larson, 1994) zurückgreifen. Diese sets, styles und schemes erleichtern es Menschen, Informationen in bereits bestehende Kategorien einzuordnen und sie dementsprechend zu interpretieren.…”