Foreign Policy Decisionmakers As Practical-Intuitive Historians

Applied History and Its Shortcomings

Datos Bibliográficos

ID6273418
AutoresYaacov Y I Vertzberger (autor de correspondencia)
Año1986
Volumen30
Número2
Páginas223
Fecha de publicación1986-06-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaInternational Studies Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0020-8833 • E-ISSN: 1468-2478
EditorialOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2600677
OpenAlexW2153469628
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas24
Referencias citadas40

In performing judgment, inference and choice functions in the foreign policy decisionmaking process, decisionmakers acting as practical-intuitive historians rely on a variety of procedures. These include: rules of thumb, heuristics, propositional knowledge structures and non-propositional structures of a more schematic nature. These procedures draw, among other sources, on the decisionmakers' subjective information and comprehension of events, situations and personalities from one's own nation's history or foreign nations' histories, and are applied to current tasks. This study attempts to introduce a systematic theoretical analysis of how decisionmakers use these historical analogies, metaphors and extrapolations. The main questions discussed are: What are the functions the use of history serves? How are past, present and future compared? What motivates the use of history? And what are the typical shortcomings of using history as expressed in potential biases and errors? The study concludes with a number of prescriptive suggestions for controlling the risks of abusing history

Economics · Foreign policy · Law and economics · Management science · Operations research · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Complex Systems and Decision Making · Economic, financial, and policy analysis · Engineering · Evaluation and Performance Assessment · Law