4 - See No Evil, Speak No Evil?

Summary

In this chapter, with Caleb Pomeroy, I take a number of theories from moral and social psychology grounded in evolutionary claims and show that they illuminate critical components of international relations and foreign policy behavior. First, it is almost impossible to talk about threat and harm without invoking morality. Second, state leaders and the public will use moral judgments as a basis, indeed the most important factor, for assessing international threat, just as research shows they do at the interpersonal level. We test the first claim using a word embeddings analysis of several large textual corpora. Whether it be speeches before the United Nations or private deliberations of American foreign policy officials, when policymakers and politicians talk about harm and threat, they simultaneously use words indicating judgments about immorality in the same way that everyday citizens do. The second claim rests on Fiske’s “warmth-competence” model, which identifies moral characteristics as the most important criteria by which we form our impressions of others. An original survey experiment on the Russian public shows we do the same with nation-states. We buttress these findings by analyzing two observational surveys of Chinese respondents and another three survey experiments with Russian and American respondents.