EVOLUTIONARY MODELS IN FOREIGN-POLICY ANALYSIS

There is a tension in the social sciences between rational choice mode ls and decision-making data, often drawn from psychological experiment s. Rational choice models assume that decision makers behave as if the y were unitary actors, meeting formal criteria of rationality. The emp irical results from psychology, as well as case studies of foreign pol icy decisions, show that humans rarely act as if they were rational. N evertheless, there is also strong empirical support for rational choic e models, and this approach has generated a number of important insigh ts about international politics. Evolutionary models show how a collec tive actor, such as a state, can appear to behave rationally, even if the individuals who comprise that actor are not rational themselves.