How do cognitive biases relevant to foreign policy decision making aggregate in groups? Many tendencies identified in the behavioral decision-making literature—such as reactive devaluation, the intentionality bias, and risk seeking in the domain of losses—have been linked to hawkishness in foreign policy choices, potentially increasing the risk of conflict, but how these “hawkish biases” operate in the small-group contexts in which foreign policy decisions are often made is unknown. We field three large-scale group experiments to test how these biases aggregate in groups. We find that groups are just as susceptible as individuals to these canonical biases, with neither hierarchical nor horizontal group decision-making structures significantly attenuating the magnitude of bias. Moreover, diverse groups perform similarly to more homogeneous ones, exhibiting similar degrees of bias and marginally increased risk of dissension. These results suggest that at least with these types of biases, the “aggregation problem” may be less problematic for psychological theories in international relations than some critics have argued. This has important implications for understanding foreign policy decision making, the role of group processes, and the behavioral revolution in international relations.

与外交政策决策相关的认知偏差如何在群体中聚集？行为决策文献中发现的许多趋势——如反应性贬值、意向性偏见和损失领域的风险寻求——与外交政策选择中的鹰派有关，可能会增加冲突的风险，但这些“鹰派偏见”在经常做出外交政策决定的小团体背景下运作是未知的。我们进行了三个大规模的群体实验，以测试这些偏见如何在群体中聚集。我们发现，群体和个人一样容易受到这些典型偏见的影响，无论是等级还是水平的群体决策结构都没有显着减弱偏见的程度。此外，不同群体的表现与更同质的群体相似，表现出相似程度的偏见和轻微增加的分歧风险。这些结果表明，至少对于这些类型的偏见，“聚合问题”对于国际关系中的心理学理论来说可能没有一些批评者认为的那么成问题。这对于理解外交政策决策、群体过程的作用以及国际关系中的行为革命具有重要意义。