The SMU Tower Center would like to invite you to the National Security Lecture: The Damocles Delusion: The Sense of Power Inflates Threat Perception in World Politics.

Date: Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Time: 6:00 – 7:30 p.m.

5:30 – 6:00 p.m. Registration and Reception

6:00 – 7:30 p.m. Event

Location: Walsh Room, SMU Underwood Law Library,  6550 Hillcrest Ave., Dallas, TX 75205

The event is free and open to the public. Registration is required. Please click below for registration.

How does power affect threat perception? Drawing on advances in psychological research on power, I find that the sense of state power inflates threat perception. The sense of power activates intuitive thinking in the decisionmaking process, including a reliance on gut feelings and cognitive shortcuts like heuristics and prior beliefs. In turn, psychological IR research shows that these mechanisms tend to inflate threat perception. The powerful assess threats from the gut rather than head. Experimental evidence from the US and China, a re-analysis of a Russian elite survey, and a large-scale text analysis of Cold War US foreign policy elites lend support to this expectation. The findings help to psychologically reconcile enduring theoretical puzzles -- from underbalancing to overextension -- and generate entirely new ones, like the possibility that decisionmakers of rising, not declining, states feel greater fear. Together, the paper offers a "first image reversed" challenge to bottom-up accounts of psychological IR. Decisionmakers are also dependent variables shaped by the balance of power, with important implications for a world returning to great power competition.

Featuring:

Caleb Pomeroy, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto

Caleb Pomeroy is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto's Department of Political Science and Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. He researches the psychology of power in international relations, notably the effects of relative state power on human thought and behavior. His book project shows that the feeling of power inflates threat perception. His work is published or forthcoming at the American Political Science Review, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Peace Research, and Security Studies, among other outlets. Prior to joining U of T, he was a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at Stanford University and the Diana Davis Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow in US Foreign Policy and International Security at Dartmouth College.

Discussant: Stefano Recchia, John G. Tower Distinguished Chair in International Politics and National Security, SMU Tower Center

Stefano Recchia holds the John G. Tower Distinguished Chair in International Politics and National Security as an associate professor at SMU. He also directs the Tower Center’s National Security Program. Recchia’s research and teaching focus on the politics and ethics of military intervention, multilateral cooperation in security affairs, and U.S. foreign policy and transatlantic relations. His new book, Strategies for Approval: Building Support for Military Intervention at the United Nations Security Council, is forthcoming with Yale University Press. The book explores how the United States and other Western powers have been able to win UN Security Council approval for their military interventions over the last three decades, when veto-wielding permanent members such as Russia and China were are at first adamantly opposed.

Any person who requires a reasonable accommodation on the basis of a disability in order to participate in this program should contact the SMU Tower Center at tower@smu.edu in advance at least 4 days prior to the event to arrange for the accommodation.

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