Building Politics into Psychology: The Misperception of Threat

The impact of cognitive and motivated errors on the misperception of threat is examined. These errors are then treated as mediating variables and the impact of political and strategic variables which make these errors more likely or compound their impact is assessed. The essay concludes that explanations of the misperception of threat are deficient in three important ways. Current theories do not consider the interaction among cognitive heuristics and biases and their cumulative impact on the misperception of threat in international relations. Nor do they integrate affective and cognitive processes in their explanations of distorted threat perception. Finally, they do not consider systematically the impact of political and strategic factors. Politics must be explicitly built into psychological explanations of threat perception in international relations.