Professor David Houghton (Naval War College)
29th November 2022
Growing understanding of the connections between the mind and the body, and of the ways in which interoception influences decision making, may well revolutionize our understanding of how decisions are reached in foreign policy analysis, drawing attention to a phenomenon which has been termed ‘visceral politics’. Applying the somatic marker theory to an understanding of political decision making, this talk briefly analyses President William McKinley’s decision making prior to the Spanish-American War, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s decisions about the Iran hostage rescue mission, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s Kosovo decision making, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s decisions about the Bin Laden raid, and National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s decision making about Syria.
