文摘
Emotions tend to affect decisions to a greater extent than rational calculations. Nevertheless, the predominance of emotions has been largely neglected by political scientists. Indeed, it is often difficult to demonstrate that emotions affected a particular political decision. Conventional research strategies, however, tend to underrate the impact of emotions, inasmuch as they take the rational actor model as a baseline, drawing on emotions only to explain residual variance. The article thus pleads for integrating emotional factors more thoroughly into mainstream IR theories.