In Lieu of Rationality: Psychological Perspectives on Foreign Policy Decision Making

For a generation, the social science literature on decision making has been divided into two camps: work premised on rational models of choice and work designed to discredit such models. The sustained attack on the possibility of fully rational decision making has a distinguished history (for example, Barnard, 1938; Simon, 1946, 1959; Lindblom, 1959, 1965; Cyert and March, 1963; Allison, 1971; Slovic, 1972; Tversky and Kahneman, 1974) and a consistent refrain: in practice, consequential decision making hardly ever fulfills the dictates of perfect rationality. The vocabulary of decision making now includes such concepts as satisficing, bounded rationality, muddling through, bureaucratic politics, heuristics, and so forth.