At the level of foreign policy decision-making, fear may not only increase the
tendency to misunderstand or dismiss the adversary’s point of view, but it may also
cause decision-makers to ignore divergent interpretations or even stifle internal
disagreement and dissent. Those who are afraid tend to look for more threats. The
fearful tend to rally around the flag, and attempt to bolster their sense that they are
right. Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, and Jeff Greenberg suggest that the fear
of death can decrease tolerance for disconfirming information and views: ‘when
thoughts of death are salient, people generally become less tolerant and more hostile
toward those with diverging views. In dozens of experiments, mortality salience has
been shown to lead to more negative evaluations of those with different political
orientations and attitudes toward a diverse array of subjects.’^52
‘Groupthink’, a tendency to value consensus over critical thinking and an
unquestioning adherence to the beliefs and decisions of the group – rises when actors
are gripped by fear. When groupthink occurs, group members’ ‘striving for
unanimity override[s] their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of
action’ and leads to a ‘deterioration in mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral
judgment’.^53 To the extent that groups are already ethnocentric, nationalist and
militarist, fear will likely magnify the salience of those beliefs and their policy
impact.^54 Those who question the worldview dominant in strongly identified groups
will be viewed negatively.^55
Focusing on fear (and anger) may suggest why some regions seem to have long
periods of war and crisis. Each crisis feeds the spiral of fear and distrust, and genera-
tions may grow up primed to fear their neighbours. Protracted, intergenerational
conflicts are probably those where the baseline of underlying biology has shifted
toward hyper-arousal among elite decision-makers on both sides, at the same time
that fear becomes institutionalized in a positive feedback loop that is difficult to break
or mitigate. Individual and group perceptions of repeated insults lead to anger which
tends, like fear, to decrease the quality of information processing, while at the same
time increasing group confidence and the willingness to take risks.^56 As Booth and
Wheeler argue, security dilemmas are both about interpreting the other’s motives,
intentions and capabilities and about determining a response.^57 Fear thus keeps active
security dilemma action-reaction dynamics that produce a spiral of mutual hostility
and escalation.
How can foreign policy decision-makers ameliorate the deleterious effects of
individual and institutionalized fear? At the organizational level, intelligence that
disconfirms potentially threatening information that will induce fear should be for-
warded alongside the threatening information. Decision-makers should be reminded
not to discount the disconfirming evidence and organizations should be tasked with
looking for non-threatening cues.
Fear is obviously not the only important emotional relationship between groups
or states. The degree of empathy and trust that groups feel toward one another may
account for the quality of their relationship. Richard Rorty has argued that
dehumanization accounts for ethnic cleansing, while increased sentimentality and
empathy account for our willingness to intervene in such conflicts.^58 Some historical
170 Rethinking ‘man’