Rational choice is not a substantive theory of international politics, but rather a methodological approach that focuses on certain types of social explanation for phenomena.
Chances of cooperation and peaceful resolution can be increased through costly signaling,[7][8][9] long shadows of the future,[10][11] and tit-for-tat bargaining strategies.
The “logic of consequences” entails that actors are assumed to choose the most efficient means to reach their goals on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis.
[15] This stands in contrast to the logic of appropriateness whereby actors follow “internalized prescriptions of what is socially defined as normal, true, right, or good, without, or in spite of calculation of consequences and expected utility”.
[32] Building on canonical work by James Fearon, there are two prominent signaling mechanisms in the rational choice literature: sinking costs and tying hands.
[42] Stephen Walt argues that while the bargaining model of war (as presented by Fearon) is an "insightful and intelligent" formalization of how a lack of information and commitment problems under anarchy can lead states into conflict, it is ultimately not a "new theoretical claim" but rather another way of expressing ideas that the likes of Robert Art, Robert Jervis and Kenneth Oye have previously presented.
[40] According to Erik Gartzke, the bargaining model is useful for thinking probabilistically about international conflict, but the onset of any specific war is theoretically indeterminate.
He added that rationalist models were limited in their empirical applicability due to the presence of multiple equilibria (i.e. folk theorem) and flaws in human updating.
He criticized the shift in security studies research towards formal models, arguing that it added unnecessary complexity (which created an appearance of greater scientism) which forced scholars and student to invest time in reading rational choice scholarship and learning formal modeling skills when the time could be spent on more productive endeavors.
[46] According to Peter Katzenstein, Robert Keohane and Stephen Krasner, rational choice research is limited in the sense that it struggles to explain the sources of actors' preferences.
An audience cost is a term in international relations theory that describes the electoral penalty a leader incurs from his or her constituency if they escalate a foreign policy crisis and are then seen as backing down.
[48] The term was popularized in a 1994 academic article by James Fearon where he argued that democracies carry greater audience costs than authoritarian states, which makes them better at signaling their intentions in interstate disputes.
Two studies 2001, using the MID and ICB datasets, provided empirical support for the notion that democracies were more likely to issue effective threats.
[55] A 2012 study by Alexander B. Downes and Todd S. Sechser found that existing datasets were not suitable to draw any conclusions as to whether democratic states issued more effective threats.
[56] A 2017 study which recoded flaws in the MID dataset ultimately conclude, " that there are no regime-based differences in dispute reciprocation, and prior findings may be based largely on poorly coded data.
[59] Research by Jessica Weeks argued that some authoritarian regime types have similar audience costs as in democratic states.
[60][61] A 2014 study by Jessica Chen Weiss argued that the Chinese regime fomented or clamped down on nationalist (or anti-foreign) protests in China in order to signal resolve.
However, cumulative research in neuroscience suggests that only a small part of the brain's activities operate at the level of conscious reflection.
Emotions are inextricably intertwined with people's social norms and identities, which are typically outside the scope of standard rationalist accounts.