[Decision Making and International Relations:] The Cybernetic Theory Reconsidered

Robert M. Cutler

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[Decision Making and International Relations:] The Cybernetic Theory Reconsidered

Robert M. Cutler

The application of cognitive psychology to decision making in an organizational context, which has special importance for the study of foreign policy, has proceeded unsystematically in recent years. One of the potentially most fruitful approaches to this task is expressed in John D. Steinbruner’s The Cybernetic Theory of Decision.[1] The framework suggested in that book however, is equally unsystematically presented. In this review, the internal logic of that framework is reconsidered and clarified, so that the potential of that approach may be more fully realized.

Steinbruner proposes three paradigms of decision making: analytic, cybernetic, and cognitive; but the relationship between the latter two is confused. Steinbruner must have been doubtful about the status of the cognitive approach, for his chapter titles refer successively to an “analytic paradigm,” a “cybernetic paradigm,” and ‘cognitive processes.” In his conclusion, moreover, he asserts that he has established “at least two coherent and logically distinct sets of assumptions as to how such decision processes [based on fundamental operations of the human mind] operate. …" (emphasis added). The reader’s impression is that Steinbruner was unsure whether he had two or three such sets of assumptions.[2]

The cybernetic and cognitive paradigms actually do have a special relationship. In particular, “the cognitive paradigm [is used] to mean cybernetic assumptions supplemented by cognitive theory … and the cybernetic paradigm to refer to the more restricted set of assumptions.”[3] The assumptions which the cognitive and cybernetic paradigms have in common are clarified and juxtaposed to those of the analytical paradigm in Table 1.

In the analytic paradigm, it is assumed that the decision maker’s objective is to accomplish an action with reference to the environment—an action

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which must be achieved under certain limitations. The decision is reached by direct calculation of the trade-offs involved and is guided by two implicit assumptions of the decision maker: first, that alternative states of the world produce differently valued outcomes of the same course of action, and second, that outcome calculations are intuitively updated as new information becomes available.

Steinbruner maintains that the vis motiva of decision making in the cybernetic paradigm is simple and conservative, not necessarily quiescent but animated by a criterion of “survival” (in the internal context of the decision making mechanism). According to the cybernetic paradigm, the decision maker’s primary concern is to avoid being overwhelmed by the variety of the environment. In order to control the uncertainty which results from that variety, the decision maker simply avoids direct outcome calculations. Rather, complex problems are dissected, segmented, factored. This procedure disaggregates values and utilizes information selectively. “If this paradigm obtains,” the author writes,

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it is clear … that the passage of time and inflow of new information which it brings will have fundamentally different consequences. The cybernetic paradigm, in other words, implies a fundamentally different learning process [from the analytic paradigm].[4]

Although he is not explicit about it, Steinbruner then uses cognitive theory to modify those cybernetic assumptions which involve that decision maker’s thinking patterns. Such modifications are necessary because, “despite uncertainty, the mind operates so as to establish strong beliefs and to act upon them.”[5] The cognitive paradigm takes its departure from the consensus within cognitive theory that “a great deal of information processing is conducted apparently prior to and certainly independently of conscious direction and that in this activity the mind routinely performs logical operations of considerable power.”[6] The nucleus of Steinbruner’s contribution to decision making theory is the specification of these processes and their integration into a theoretical framework.

The contrasts among the analytic, cybernetic, and cognitive paradigms with regard to decision-theoretic learning are presented systematically in Table 2. Uncertainty is the “imperfect correspondence between information and the environment,”[7] and the paradigms are distinguished according to how they handle it (row 1). The way uncertainty is handled is related to how values are treated (row 2), and these two criteria define the type of learning experienced by the paradigmatic decision maker (row 3). Each paradigm also proceeds on the basis of certain assumptions about the environment (row 4). The principle according to which the decision maker’s mental processes operate (row 5) governs how the information from the environment is integrated and a decision made. The principal learning mechanisms (row 6) specify the particular paradigmatic patterns in which a decision maker ponders propositions. They likewise prescribe the paradigm’s perspective on the learning process.

Steinbruner’s emphasis on learning distinguished his work from Allison’s Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis.[8] Since Steinbruner’s work emphasizes the learning mechanisms of the cognitive paradigm, and since the innovative merit of his work also lies therein, it is appropriate to examine those mechanisms closely. They are found in the lowest right-hand cell of Table 2.

Uncertainty is subjectively resolved, Steinbruner writes, in three ways: by the principle of reinforcement, by the operation of inconsistency management mechanisms, and by the effects of small-group interactions. This suggestion is worthwhile, but the theoretical distinctions among the three categories are often blurred in practice. Their dynamics may be separable, but Steinbruner does not provide a method for distinguishing their effects. Reinforcement, as Steinbruner uses the term, means intermittent reinforcement, the principle underlying the success of the slot machine:

… occasional reward is sufficient to induce people to participate in behavior despite a great deal of frustration. In cognitive operations this means that if a decision maker attaches very general beliefs to the information which he receives in the decision process, inter-

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mittent success with specific decisions will tend to give strength to the general beliefs, quite apart from the validity of the connection in strict logical terms.[9]

Small-group interaction, however, is only a social form of reinforcement, occurring reciprocally among the interactants rather than solitarily in the mind of an isolated one. It is actually a secondary reinforcement, for approbation and stigma are but social forms of reward and punishment.

Steinbruner pays most attention to inconsistency management. Two principles come into play here: simplicity and stability. These assert, respectively, that cognitive inference mechanisms “work to keep the structure of beliefs as simple as possible” and “resist change in the core structure of beliefs.” Steinbruner’s reasoning here is straightforward and insightful. He specifies and creatively discusses several methods of inconsistency management: analogical inference, transformational inference (wishful thinking), and two others which collapse into a category of negative logic.[10]

He ignores, however, one important method of inconsistency management. We know, from the lowest right-hand cell of Table 1, that the decision maker, in both the cybernetic and the cognitive paradigm, monitors only a few of the incoming channels or variables. Steinbruner neglects to suggest that a decision maker might resolve an inconsistency by changing the channels or variables monitored. As Pepitone puts it, “sentiment change is not the only mode of resolution.”[11]

This criticism leads to a broader consideration. There is an unresolved debate among cognitive theorists on whether people always seek supporting information in preference to discrepant information.[12] That debate reflects a lack of consensus among inconsistency theorists over whether there is, along with a consistency principle, a “variety principle.” Clearly, there are idiosyncratic as well as situational differences in tolerance for inconsistency.[13] Steinbruner, however, does not address the question of whether a variety principle, distinct from and antithetical to the consistency principle, may come into play. In fact, he only summarily addresses the question of motivation in inconsistency management, positing a facsimile of a relatively primitive drive theory: inconsistency exists; therefore, it must be reduced.[14] He ignores the argument for variety, including a plausible variant which hypothesizes that individuals seek a level of tension optimal for their purposes: it is commonplace that some people work better when under a certain amount of pressure.[15]

Steinbruner’s theory culminates in the delineation of “three coherent and non-idiosyncratic thought patterns” which he derives from cognitive principles and which “emerge in organizational decision process.”[16] Their differences are summarized in Table 3. Steinbruner correctly calls them “the most direct and immediately usable contribution of cognitive theory to the analysis of complex policy problems”; his own application of them to a case study, however, is less successful.[17] This clarification and critique will, one hopes, permit their wider and more successful use.

In particular, the behavior of theoretical and uncommitted thinkers offers a fruitful point of departure. Steinbruner hints that the former (who are

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usually the policy advisors and advocates in an organization) modify their policy proposals to the latter (usually policy advisees and decision makers) in a fashion consistent with the constrained learning model of the cognitive paradigm. It appears, further, that the latter evaluate that advice in a fashion consistent with the instrumental learning model of the cybernetic paradigm. Therefore, the paradigms themselves can also be used to explore the organizational dynamics of decision making, especially incremental decision making.[18]

Notes

[1]. John D. Steinbruner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision: New Dimensions of Political Analysis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974).

[2]. Ibid., p. 327; cf. Arnold L. Horelick, A. Ross Johnson, and John D. Steinbruner, The Study of Soviet Foreign Policy: A Review of Decision-Theory-Related Approaches, Rand Report R–1334 (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corporation, December 1973), p. 13.

[3]. Steinbruner, Cybernetic Theory…, p. 112.

[4]. Ibid., p. 78.

[5]. Ibid., p. 109.

[6]. Ibid., p. 92; emphasis in the original.

[7]. Ibid., p. 16.

[8]. Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision; Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown & Co., 1971).

[9]. Steinbruner, Cybernetic Theory…, p. 113.

[10]. Ibid., pp. 101–2.

[11]. Albert Pepitone, “Some Conceptual and Empirical Problems of Consistency Models,” in Shel Feldman (ed.), Cognitive Consistency (New York: Academic Press, 1966), pp. 292–93. For a concise list of inconsistency-reducing mechanisms, see Norman Miller, "As Time Goes By," in Robert P. Abelson, et al. (eds.), Theories of Cognitive Consistency (Chicago, Ill.: Rand McNally, 1968), p. 590.

[12]. See the papers—too numerous to cite individually—in Abelson et al. (eds.), Theories of Cognitive Consistency, pp. 769–800.

[13]. William J. McGuire, “The Current Status of Cognitive Consistency Theories,” in Feldman (ed.), Cognitive Consistency, p. 26.

[14]. See Jerome E. Singer, “Motivation for Consistency,” in ibid., esp. pp. 52–56 and 65–71; and Albert Pepitone, “The Problem of Motivation in Consistency Models,” in Abelson, et al. (eds.), Theories of Cognitive Consistency, esp. pp. 323–24.

[15]. Albert Pepitone, “Some Conceptual and Empirical Problems of Consistency Models,” in Feldman (ed.), Cognitive Consistency, p. 260.

[16]. Steinbruner, Cybernetic Theory…, p. 139.

[17]. Ibid., pp. 135–36. Steinbruner’s case study is of the evolution of the multilateral force (MLF) proposal between 1956 and 1964; the most useful part of it is chap. 10, “Epilogue: Conclusions and Implications.”

[18]. It would be particularly instructive to explore the resonances of Steinbruner’s book with David Braybrooke and Charles E. Lindblom, A Strategy of Decision (New York: Macmillan, 1963), especially chaps. 3–6.

Dr. Robert M. Cutler [ website — email ] was educated at MIT and The University of Michigan, where he earned a Ph.D. in Political Science, and has specialized and consulted in the international affairs of Europe, Russia, and Eurasia since the late 1970s. He has held research and teaching positions at major universities in the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, and Russia, and contributed to leading policy reviews and academic journals as well as the print and electronic mass media in three languages.

 
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