Information asymmetry, not self-serving motives, drives egocentric inference in foreign policy

Evidence

In foreign policy as well, the degree to which a factor is seen as influential depends in part on the amount of information that the decision-maker has about it. What the decision-maker is most likely to know about are his own worries and plans, thus contributing to the egocentric nature of inference. This bias is not necessarily a selfserving one—the actor does not always see himself in a favorable light. Rather, people place themselves at the center of others’ attention, believing that others are reacting to them or trying to affect them. Since the decision-maker knows about his state’s policy in great detail, it will be relatively easy for him to find some element in it that could have been the cause or the object of the other state’s actions. By contrast, many of the other possible causes of the other state’s behavior are seen only in dim outline. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2579

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the fundamental attribution error and actor-observer asymmetry literature in social psychology.