Self-Images of Hawks and Doves: A Control Systems Model of Militarism

According to prevailing cognitive models, hawk and dove policy preferences originate in divergent information about the causes of war, not in divergent motivations. However, data from a June 1990 survey of the Council on Foreign Relations and two attentive publics indicate divergent motivations. Hawk and dove policy preferences are associated, for males, with macho and idealistic self systems respectively. Female hawks and doves are also found to maintain distinctive self-images. While the present data support the contribution of personality to behavior, the contribution of cognition also has some empirical support. A new control systems model of political behavior is presented, subsuming the partial truths of cognition-driven and personality-driven explanations. Origins and dynamics of the hawk personality are briefly explained in terms of social learning and psychoanalytic theories. The article concludes with practical recommendations for reducing militarism at its psychological sources. This article presents survey data on self-image and militarism that challenge purely cognitive explanations of political behavior. Control theory-or the theory of self-regulating, negative-feedback systems-is used to bridge the conceptual rift that currently separates personality-driven from cognition-driven explanatory models. The article concludes with some practical implications of the present data and theory for the reduction and eventual elimination of international violence.