Think Ahead: Cost Discounting and External Validity in Foreign Policy Survey Experiments

Abstract

This paper considers the implications of construal level theory in the context of survey experiments probing foreign policy opinion formation. Psychology research demonstrates that people discount the long-term consequences of decisions, thinking about distal or hypothetical events more abstractly than immediate scenarios. I argue that this tendency introduces a bias into survey experiments on foreign policy opinion. Respondents reasoning about an impending military engagement are likelier to consider its costs than are those reasoning in the abstract hypothetical environment. I provide evidence of this bias by replicating a common audience costs experimental design and introducing a prompt to consider casualties. I find that priming respondents to articulate their expectations about casualties in a foreign intervention reduces support and dampens the experimental effect, thereby cutting the estimated absolute audience cost substantially. This result suggests a gap between how survey respondents approach hypothetical and real situations of military intervention.

Untying Hands: De-escalation, Reputation, and Dynamic Audience Costs

“…The messenger is the foreign opponent in the counterthreat treatment but neutral 12 For validation studies of Lucid samples against National Census benchmarks and US probability samples, see Coppock and McClellan (2019). As the focus is on testing hypotheses rather than making claims about population parameters, previous experiments on domestic audience costs have used non-probability samples recruited through Mechanical Turk or commercial survey companies (e.g., Brutger 2021;Huddleston 2019;Kertzer and Brutger 2016;Levy et al 2015;Lin-Greenberg 2019;Nomikos and Sambanis 2019;Quek 2017).…”

“…Consider foreign policy crises where one state publicly threatens to intervene, which constitute the standard setting in most experiments on audience costs (Brutger 2021; Croco, Hanmer, and McDonald 2021; Davies and Johns 2013; Huddleston 2019; Kertzer and Brutger 2016; Levendusky and Horowitz 2012; Levy et al 2015; Li and Chen 2021; Lin-Greenberg 2019; Nomikos and Sambanis 2019; Quek 2017; Schwartz and Blair 2020; Tomz 2007; Trager and Vavreck 2011). How do opponents in the real world respond to public threats?…”