Does Military Experience Really Matter? An Empirical Examination of Decision Framing and Deterrence Decision-Making

While it is widely understood that risk tolerance shapes conflict behavior, research in cognitive psychology has long demonstrated that reframing otherwise identical objective conditions can significantly alter people’s risk perception. Nonetheless, the potential impact of reframing during immediate deterrence has received little empirical scrutiny. In this study, we focus our attention on a comparison of the lay public and experienced military officials who, due to their expertise and training, are presumed to be less vulnerable to cognitive biases when making judgments about military affairs. To test this proposition, we deployed a unique set of deterrence decision experiments that, for the first time, directly compare the impact of reframing on a representative sample of the public and on a large (n = 479) sample of experienced active-duty US military officers (ranked Major through General) across three conflict domains (conventional, cyber, and nuclear). We find that, despite their greater expertise with military operations, officers are not less vulnerable to reframing than the lay public. Our results both conditionally challenge the common refrain that military officers serve as “adults in the room” during a crisis and establish that reframing within a crisis constitutes an underexplored mechanism that can both stabilize and destabilize deterrence dynamics.