How Political Psychologists Think

Abstract

John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato’s How States Think is an engagingly written book that tackles big questions central to International Relations: what does it mean to be rational, and how prevalent is rationality in international politics? However, the book mischaracterizes how political psychologists think about rationality in international politics, mistaking revisions of specific modeling assumptions for rejections of rationality more generally. As a result, many of the book’s critiques are unpersuasive, and its attempts to root rationality in a specific understanding of “credible theories” run into conceptual challenges. Moreover, Mearsheimer and Rosato’s tendency to stake out bold claims rather than measured ones–the same punchiness that also makes the book so provocative–also leads it to exceed its evidentiary limits, resulting in inferences that it is incapable of substantiating.