Thought Process
Q&A
Misperception is Reality BY JOSHUA KEATING ’07
JOSHUA KEATING: Were international affairs and foreign policy something you were actively engaged with while a student at Oberlin?
JK: The topic of perception and misperception has been a major theme in your work. I’m wondering how you first got interested in looking at that.
Political scientist Robert Jervis ’62 has become one of the most widely cited and respected scholars in international relations largely by pointing out the field’s inadequacies and blind spots. In his classic works, including System Effects, Perception and Misperception in International Politics, and the more recent How Statesmen Think, Jervis has drawn insights from other fields, including political psychology and complexity theory, to make a convincing case that not only are governments and leaders not the rational actors they are often presumed to be by traditional models of state behavior, but that “rationality” itself may be a flawed concept when it comes to statecraft. Jervis, who is the Adlai Stevenson Professor of International Politics at Columbia University and a former president of the American Political Science Association, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in April 2021. He recently spoke with Joshua Keating ’07, a senior editor at Slate, to discuss what he’s learned from a career of trying to make sense of a very irrational world. 16
RJ: Well, ironically, I backed into it. I was very interested in nuclear deterrence theory and practice. At that time, the main critics of deterrence were social psychologists, who argued that we’d created this myth of a Soviet danger, and that policies meant to counter it were making things worse. I thought they were wrong about the Soviet Union, but I realized they were quite right that no political scientists, or almost none, had taken any account of perception and the possibility of recurring misperception. I thought that was something that needed to be studied. As I got more deeply into the history of social psychology, I became less critical of its application to the Cold War, although I still thought that the scholars who claimed the Cold War was a misunderstanding were wrong, but I did gain an appreciation that they were not totally foolish. And then as I got in, I just found the topic of how [policymakers] perceive each other to be fascinating on its own.
JERVIS PHOTO COURTESY OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY RYAN SPROWL
ROBERT JERVIS: Oh, very much. I was there from ’58 to ’62 during one of the heights of the Cold War. The missile gap [between the U.S. and the USSR] was the major political issue then. There was a good group of political scientists. Four or five of us went on to get PhDs and to teach in major institutions. And so we’d talk about this all the time. I remember when Khrushchev broke up the Paris Summit meeting in May 1960 because of Eisenhower’s refusal to apologize sufficiently for the U2 incident. Khrushchev was flying back to Moscow. At about midnight one of my Oberlin section mates was listening to the radio and heard the report that Khrushchev was stopping in East Berlin to sign a peace treaty with East Germany, which would have triggered an enormous crisis and real danger of war. So he woke us up and said, “Don’t bother studying for finals or anything, let’s just go out and drink.” So that’s what we did.