Poliheuristic Theory of Decision-Making - International Relations - Oxford Bibliographies

The Poliheuristic Theory of Decision-Making (PHT) represents a leading theoretical effort in Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) to transcend the divide between cognitive and rationalist approaches to explaining foreign policy decisions. While the theory has only entered the field in the 1990s and is thus among the more recent additions to the FPA “toolbox,” its basic tenets have already been substantiated through a wide array of qualitative case studies, experimental works, and quantitative analyses. At its core, PHT proposes a two-stage analytic model that combines a heuristics-based decision strategy that ties in with cognitivist perspectives on decision-making and a subsequent stage that corresponds to rationalist expectations. On the first stage of the model, actors apply a range of cognitive shortcuts that run counter to rational choice assumptions and serve to simplify the decision problem by swiftly eliminating unacceptable alternatives from the choice set. On the second stage, actor

The Poliheuristic Theory of Decision-Making (PHT) represents a leading theoretical effort in Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) to transcend the divide between cognitive and rationalist approaches to explaining foreign policy decisions. While the theory has only entered the field in the 1990s and is thus among the more recent additions to the FPA “toolbox,” its basic tenets have already been substantiated through a wide array of qualitative case studies, experimental works, and quantitative analyses. At its core, PHT proposes a two-stage analytic model that combines a heuristics-based decision stra