Foreign Policy Decision Making in Familiar and Unfamiliar Settings

The concept of policy makers’ familiarity with a decision task has received considerable attention in recent years in the literature on decision making by analogy, intuitive decision making, and dynamic versus static decision making. The effect of familiarity on the decision strategy change of high-ranking officers of the U.S. Air Force is tested to see whether and how familiar versus unfamiliar decision tasks affect decision strategy change during the decision-making process. Results support the noncompensatory principle of political decision making and poliheuristic theory: Leaders are sensitive to negative political advice, which is often noncompensatory. They first use dimensions to eliminate noncompensatory alternatives and then evaluate acceptable alternatives. This two-stage process is even more pronounced in unfamiliar decision settings with low or high levels of ambiguity—a situation that characterizes many foreign policy crises.