mearsheimer's 5 assumptions of realism

for this article. Psychologists argue that the ingroup/outgroup distinction develops from a need for social identity. Mearsheimer explains and argues for his theory of "offensive realism" by stating its key assumptions, evolution from early realist theory, and its predictive capability. Incorporating ideas from the life sciences into the social sciencesrich in the study of culture and institutions and other influences on political behaviorwill help scholars base their theories in rigorous scientific principles and subject their assumptions to empirical testing.Reference Wilson20,21 Our approach draws heavily on evolutionary anthropology, which recognizes that human behavior is in large part the result of evolved cognitive, physiological, and behavioral mechanisms designed to solve recurrent problems confronted by our ancestors in the environment in which we evolved. Retaliation and collaboration among humans, Interests, Institutions, and Information: Domestic Politics and International Relations, Evolutionary biology: Struggling to escape exclusively individual selection, Reintroducing group selection to the human behavioural sciences, The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Origins of Cooperation, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power and the Pursuit of Office, Inferences of competence from faces predict election outcomes, Selected: Why Some People Lead, Why Others Follow, and Why It Matters, Presidential Ambition: Gaining Power at Any Cost, Women and the evolution of world politics, Madam President: Women Blazing the Leadership Trail, Misperception and the causes of war: Theoretical linkages and analytical problems, Aggression and the self: High self-esteem, low self-control, and ego threat, Human Aggression: Theories, Research, and Implications for Social Policy, Victims of Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, Collective violence: comparisons between youths and chimpanzees. How does the evolutionary perspective outlined above relate to offensive realism? The key observation is that bonobos are less aggressive than chimpanzees. With regard to U.S. foreign policy, he advocated a strategy of global balancing rather than global hegemony. A superpower such as the United States, he argued, should not try to impose its rule on all continents but should intervene only when another major power threatens to rule a region of strategic importance. We recognize that a challenge to the theory of offensive realism is the empirical mix of cooperation and conflict in the real world. Egoism and dominance arose as strategies that provided solutions to achieving survival and reproduction in this environment. Clearly, not all individuals or businesses or states act the same way all the time or in all circumstances. However, even fellow realists have found problems and inconsistencies with Waltz's structural realism. Total loading time: 0 Many models of consumer behavior include fundamental assumptions which are rarely questioned. Indeed, cultural selection has often reinforced, not reduced, these very behaviors over human history. Each season at Evermore Park brings new adventures, fit for all ages. After graduating from the United States Military Academy (West Point) in 1970, Mearsheimer served for five years as an officer in the air force, rising to the rank of captain. Mearsheimer follows on the premises of Kenneth Waltz's theory by deriving the behavior of states from the "structure" of the international system. Where a states own security is threatened or the state becomes vulnerable to exploitation, alliances offer one means of increasing or preserving power. Gat, 2006, p. 427; see also Elizabeth Knowles, ed.. See, for example, the recent articles and responses here: Steven Pinker, The false allure of group selection. If anything, group selection would tend to increase violence, since between-group competition (conflict among strangers) can be more brutal than within-group competition (conflict among kin and fellow group members). This recurrence of behavioral patterns across different taxonomic groups suggests that the behaviors characterized by offensive realism have broad and deep evolutionary roots. To an observant international relations scholar, the behavior of chimpanzees is remarkably like the behavior of states predicted by the theory of offensive realism. A comparison among alternative realist theories. Although Thomas Hobbes claimed to have deduced Leviathan scientifically from motion and the physical senses, he was writing two hundred years before Darwin and so had no understanding of evolution.Reference Hobbes53 International relations scholars have tended to claim to deduce their own theories from Hobbes, or subsequent philosophers who followed him, and we suggest it is time to revisit the idea of foundational scientific principles. A states elitesits captains of industry and media and its military and political leadersmay be more likely than average to show these traits in abundance for five reasons. The imperative for survival in a hostile environment also requires that an individual organism places its survival, especially in a time of danger or stress, above the survival of others. In short, our theory is one of behavioral ecologyhuman and animal behaviors are not constants, but are contingent strategies that become engaged or elevated in order to best seek payoffs depending on the particular circumstance or environment. This version of realism retains the traditional realist assumption that the primary state goal is power, rather than the defensive realist assumption that states seek security. Furthermore, cooperation is often itself a means to power maximization in the formation of military and security alliancesand thus, cooperation can be a prediction of, not a challenge to, offensive realism. Mearsheimer notably advocated the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Europe, arguing that their presence there was irrational, as no state currently threatened to dominate the continent. Evolution is sometimes argued to operate on groups rather than individuals (group selection). The organism has to ensure that its physiological needs (for food, water, shelter, and so on) are satisfied so that it can survive and reproduce. However, an evolutionary perspective is particularly useful here because it predicts that behavior is contingent, not fixed. Our argument may be useful for three reasons. Cooperation and peace efforts often fail precisely because people have too rosy a view of human nature and thus fail to structure incentives effectively. Chagnon, Wrangham and Glowacki and others have also shown that individuals, as well as the group, may gain significant reputational and reproductive advantages of participation in warfare. Similarly formidable obstacles to cooperation exist in international relations. Although Mearsheimer recognized war as a legitimate instrument of statecraft, he did not believe that it was always justified. Reproductive access to females tends to be highly skewed, with a few males responsible for a large proportion of progeny. Waltzs core concept in Theory of International Politics is the anarchy that reigns in world politics. Mearsheimer thus judged U.S. participation in World War II to have been entirely appropriate, since Nazi Germany and imperial Japan sought to dominate their respective regions. Theories purporting to explain human behavior make explicit or implicit assumptions about preferences and motivations, and mainstream theories in international politics are no exception. That certainly may be, as he attempts to demonstrate. Bradley A. Thayer is professor of political science at the University of Iceland. In addition to fighting over resources, we can now fight over ideology as well. This parallels the primatologists argument that the efforts of chimpanzees to seek territorial expansion and as much power as possible represents an adaptive strategy to ensure survival and promote the success of future generations. As well as being the key behavioral traits identified by Mearsheimer, self-interest, social stratification, and groupish behavior are three of the most prominent behavioral features of social animals. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. No theory is perfect. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. As an alpha male provides stability to the group, so too a hegemon in international politics, as many scholars recognize, may provide stability for lesser states both in the realm of international security and for international political economy. Our theory is also unlimited in domain, explaining behavior wherever there are human actors and weak external constraints on their actions, from ancestral human groups, ethnic conflict, and civil wars to domestic politics, free markets, and international relations. When the stakes are high and ones livelihood or survival is threatened, the traits of egoism, dominance, and fear of outgroups come to the forea conclusion we can draw from any number of conflicts in the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, India, and elsewhere. These adaptations were favored by natural selection over the course of evolution and remain a significant cause of human behavior. Even if this strategy is never successful, it motivates individuals to achieve the maximum possible. Few principles unite the discipline of international relations, but one exception is anarchythe absence of government in international politics. Wilson captures the evolutionary logic succinctly, saying that humans would fight wars when they and their closest relatives stand to gain long-term reproductive success, and he continues, despite appearances to the contrary, warfare may be just one example of the rule that cultural practices are generally adaptive in a Darwinian sense.Reference Wilson73 An evolutionary approach allows the expectation that contemporary humans possess specific behavioral traits that contributed to fitness in the past, including the willingness to fight to retain or gain the resources necessary so that the individual, the family, and the extended family group would continue to survive and reproduce.Reference Lopez74, Unsurprisingly, direct evidence of human behavior from the Pleistocene era is rare, but in addition to archeological finds, we have evidence from recent and contemporary indigenous societies that offer a model for the behavior of our distant ancestors, who lived under similar social and ecological conditions. Email: Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 2016, For an analysis of offensive realism and defensive realism, see. Behavior under anarchy in different domains. Chimpanzees do at least have some important ecological similarities to humans. Instead, we can make more concrete predictions about how humans tend to think and act in different conditions, based on new scientific knowledge about human cognition and behavior, and in particular a greater understanding of the social and ecological context in which human brains and behaviors evolved. Therefore, to the extent that it matters, let us address the bonobo-chimpanzee issue briefly here, because certain phylogenetic and socio-ecological factors suggest that we are more like chimpanzees than bonobos. As such, an evolutionary account does not necessarily expect animals, humans, or states to act as offensive realists all the time and in all situations. Many criticisms of international relations theories focus on these unsubstantiated or contested assumptions about underlying human nature. PDF | Previous research has found emotion interpretation biases in individuals with social anxiety (SA) when emotions are ambiguous. https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Mearsheimer, The University of Chicago - Biography of John J. Mearsheimer. Mearsheimer and Walt in particular make cases for "restraint" and "offshore balancing," meaning a reservation of the use of force to the most serious threats to US power, coupled with a policy to prevent China's assumption of regional hegemony in Asia (Mearsheimer and Walt 2016). Starting with biology, or with human evolutionary history, has never been typical in international relations scholarship, but this approach is now less exotic than it once seemed as innovators in a range of social sciences, including economics, psychology, sociology, and political science, pursue this line of inquiry.Reference Fowler and Schreiber54,55,56,57 International relations stands to gain from similar interdisciplinary insights. For Waltz, anarchy provides the ultimate cause of state behavior, but he also uses a structuralist analysis in his argument. In short, offensive realism may really be describing the nature of the human species more than the nature of the international system. However, because anarchy is a problem both in nature and in international politics, it is no coincidence at all.

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