The Personal Touch: Leaders' Impressions, Costly Signaling, and Assessments of Sincerity in International Affairs

What counts as evidence that the other side is sincere? Within mainstream international relations literature, scholars have focused on costly signals. We argue, however, that in the real world leaders do not simply look at costly signals, but they rely to an important extent on their personal impres...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International studies quarterly 2012-09, Vol.56 (3), p.560-573
Main Authors: HALL, TODD, YARHI-MILO, KEREN
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavioral neuroscience
Cold wars
Communication
Communism
Emotional expression
Empirical evidence
Federal Republic of Germany
Government cabinets
Honesty
Indexes (Measures)
International Relations
Judgment
Optimism
Perceptions
Prime Ministers
Rationalism
Summits
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Summary:What counts as evidence that the other side is sincere? Within mainstream international relations literature, scholars have focused on costly signals. We argue, however, that in the real world leaders do not simply look at costly signals, but they rely to an important extent on their personal impressions of other leaders, taking these as credible indicators of sincerity. Our approach thus builds both upon the literature on interstate communication and perceptions and upon more recent research in the field of neuroscience regarding affective information. To probe the plausibility of our theory, we focus on the indicators British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain used to evaluate Germany sincerity in the late 1930s and Ronald Reagan employed to make sincerity judgments about Soviet intentions in the late 1980s. Additionally, we briefly discuss the 1961 Vienna Summit between Kennedy and Khrushchev as an illustration of how personal impressions can also result in negative assessments of sincerity. Our findings suggest that personal impressions are an important, but up until now relatively ignored, source of evidence for leaders of their counterparts' sincerity with significant implications for threat assessments and policy choices.
ISSN:0020-8833
1468-2478
DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2478.2012.00731.x