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International Relations and the Psychology of Time Horizons

Theories of international relations have often incorporated time horizons — a metaphor for the value actors’ place on the future relative to the present. However, they have rarely drawn from a growing body of experimental research that studies how human beings actually think about the future and how this affects their decision-making in the present. In this paper, we present relevant findings from psychology and behavioral economics, notably those of “construal level theory” (CLT), and explore these findings’ implications for three classic questions of international relations theory — cooperation, conflict, and compliance; preventive war; and coercion. We argue that experimental evidence regarding how people discount future value and construe future events challenges both neorealist and neoliberal approaches to international cooperation. We further maintain that CLT helps explain a longstanding puzzle about preventive wars — namely, why they are often initiated too late by declining powers but too soon by rising competitors. Finally, we rely on these empirical findings to explain who wins coercive contests and why compellence is often, but not always, harder than deterrence. We advise scholars of international relations and international security to pay closer attention to their assumptions about time horizons, and we suggest that these assumptions be grounded in what we know about actual human decision-making.