Last week, I introduced two types of analysis: structural and psychological. The former is most commonly used in think tanks, academia, and government. It focuses on “real stuff” as much as possible, such as economies, armies, and institutions. There is a wide range of applications for structural analysis, including prediction and forecasting. When seeking to answer predictive questions (e.g. Will China invade Taiwan before 2023?), it is certainly helpful to look at subjects like relative wealth, military strength, and systems of governance. This can lead to important conclusions about the likelihood of an invasion occurring, which can inform our strategies for diplomacy, deterrence, and response.
However, as evidenced by the surprising decision of the Russian government to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, structural analysis is not perfect. In this case, structural factors suggested that the costs of an attack would be extremely high for the Russian government, so a full invasion was viewed as unlikely. Instead, most analysts argued that a peaceful solution to the crisis or a limited incursion into Ukrainian territory was a more probable outcome. Clearly, this view turned out to be incorrect.
This prediction was inaccurate in part because structural analysis alone misses a vital element of decision-making: people. Although structural factors may inform decisions, at the end of the day, it is people who choose the policies that their countries will implement, and they are also influenced by intangible factors, such as personal views and biases. Since these psychological quirks can color interpretation of facts, world leaders can make surprising decisions that appear to run counter to expectations built by structural analysis. As a result, it is difficult to accurately predict future actions without a solid understanding of world leaders’ beliefs.
Thankfully, science has progressed to a point where we can begin address this analytical gap through the use of psychological analysis, a set of emerging tools rooted in psychology and behavioural economics. In contrast to structural analysis, the tools of psychological analysis focus on the minds of decisionmakers. How do they think? What is important to them? How do they weigh the factors that inform their choices? These are the questions that psychological analysis seeks to answer. Since international politics cannot be fully explained without a clear sense of the personalities involved, psychological analysis stands to improve our understanding of events, and in turn, our ability to react to them.
Let’s Add Some Values
Values analysis can be seen as a form of psychological analysis, and it should be used to outline how decisionmakers think. Science has established that moral reactions are both irrational and predictable. It has also proven that people have different moral compasses, and factors like political views or culture shape our values in predictable ways. Indeed, few people believe they are doing evil. Rather, their actions often align with their values, and they attempt to work backwards and find the correct reasoning to justify their immediate moral reactions. Even some of the most destructive decisions in human history were partially rooted in a sense of righteousness.
This is a useful point; with a better sense of the values of key decisionmakers, we can understand their thinking more deeply. We learn why they make certain decisions, an insight that opens the possibility of targeting their moral intuitions with strategic concessions, policies, or communications. This would resonate with their values (rather than their rationality) and shape their decisions in a way that is more advantageous, such as by deterring war or concluding a new treaty.
This is a nice idea, but how do we put it into practice?
Developing Moral Portraits
In order to operationalize values analysis for an individual, analysts need to construct the person’s moral portrait: a rough outline of the strength of their moral values. As this website has shown, there are six values that guide us:
Rigorous science, leveraging tens of thousands of interviews with people around the world, has established the existence of differing moral compasses for political groups; the care/harm value is most important to the left, libertarians weigh the liberty/oppression value most heavily (obviously), and conservatives tend to view all six values as equally valuable. These prototype moral compasses have formed the basis of most of my articles on this website, as I have attempted to explain and predict public reactions to policy based on moral values.
Scientists have also developed an online quiz that shows us how important each value is in our own psyches. This is your moral portrait. It differs somewhat from the moral compasses of political groups, because it is specific to a single person. Rather than focus on a on a type of person (e.g. conservatives) and attempt to find the common values of the type, moral portraits instead seek to gauge moral reactions from one person in order to create a model of their own particular set of values. Once completed, a moral portrait could answer many key questions: Does this person view the loyalty/betrayal value as important or not? Does he or she believe that care/harm takes precedence over fairness/cheating? Does he or she feel the sanctity/degradation value at all? With these questions answered, the moral portrait could be employed to help predict behaviour.
Recent events have demonstrated the potential gains from applying this system to world leaders, who often hold strong moral values that guide their actions. By constructing their moral portraits, we would be better able to predict their next moves or how they would react in certain situations. As past Values Added articles have demonstrated, different policies and communications products resonate with different values, an insight that can be employed cleverly to nudge world leaders towards more favourable outcomes.
For example, in the context of peace negotiations with another country, the moral portrait of one country’s leader may signal which concessions would be most valued or acceptable, potentially leading to a mutually satisfactory deal. Even if such concessions are non-starters for one negotiating party, the moral portrait may show how to communicate demands most effectively. In other words, it could help sell a negotiating position to the folks across the table.
Will This Even Work?
If effective, moral portraits would lead to actionable advice and better decisions. In fact, in the current context, it could possibly save lives, as personalized, authoritarian regimes are becoming more common and aggressive. However, this would only be true if moral portraits work, and frankly, I don’t have much evidence to suggest that they do. Past research into moral foundations have used thousands of data points to reach an average weighting of the six values for large groups, such as liberals and conservatives. This is a strong methodology, because it leverages the law of large numbers: data is most meaningful when there are many observations. In addition, this research benefitted from the active participation of the subjects under study. They willingly (and, one assumes, honestly) answered dozens of questions about their views, which helps ensure that the data is reliable.
Neither of these points are true with the study of world leaders. There are, by definition, only a few data points available: the leader and potentially their closest circle. As a result, the study cannot benefit from the law of large numbers, so the chance of a miscalculation is high. It’s a tenet of sociology that the ability to predict how large groups of people will act does not mean that we make the same prediction about one person. Individuals are simply too erratic. Situations change (sometimes prompting extremely different moral reactions), and people’s thinking evolves with time. As well, world leaders are unlikely to participate in a study by answering a survey on their values. Analysts will need to scour the historical record in order to find evidence of moral views, which is weaker data than a direct questionnaire would provide. In other words, it’s not clear that we can learn enough about leaders to establish an accurate moral portrait.
So, I am on shakier ground on this application of values analysis. However, I’m willing to stick my neck out and claim that it could be possible to establish a rough moral compass for people with extremely well documented views. Most world leaders probably fit these criteria, as they usually have long records of speeches, decisions, and policies to serve as evidence for analysis. It’s probably feasible to piece together a rough moral portrait from these sources.
But do I think this moral portrait will be accurate enough to be useful? Frankly, I don’t know. Attempting to analyse the values of high-status individuals based on publicly available materials may be a step too far, leading to gross generalizations, overconfidence and worse decision-making. We may begin to think that we know how world leaders think, which is not possible.
I’m also concerned that values analysis would be inadequately applied, becoming a sort of “personality test”, like the Myers-Briggs or, God forbid, the preposterous Red-Blue-Yellow-Green personality typology popularized in the 2014 book Surrounded by Idiots that became a standard wheeze at corporate training. Unlike the moral foundations theory, neither of these personality tests have any evidence to back them up. There are good reasons why no briefing note goes to the Prime Minister with a paragraph beginning, “We believe Vladimir Putin is an INTJ, so he’s probably going to do X”. Poorly employed, values analysis could be equally as uninsightful and ridiculous.
Even so, with these risks in mind, I think this approach is worth trying. Exclusively relying on structural analysis is clearly insufficient, and this is a new method that could lead to better outcomes. Lives are literally at stake, so some amount of experimentation is warranted. Moreover, the goal here isn’t to reach certainty. It’s just to improve our analysis. If a moral portrait would only increase our ability to forecast major international crises by 1%, so be it. That’s useful. No other analytical tool is expected to provide certain predictions, so values analysis shouldn’t be either.
With these benefits made clear, I’ll give it a try. Next week, I’ll attempt to build a moral portrait for the most dangerous man in the world: President Vladimir Putin.