Rational choices

I've been reading David R. Lake's "The Limits of Coercive Airpower" from the summer 2009 issue of International Security. It's an interesting analysis of the causes of the capitulation of Slobodan Milosevic in the conflict over Kosovo in 1998 and 1999. The Kosovo episode matters because it is often claimed by airpower advocates as clear evidence that a regime can be coerced by airpower alone.

What struck me about Lake's argument, however, was the way he talks about coercion. Here is his definition of coercion: "Coercion is the attempt to induce policy change in another entity through the issuance of threat." [Instead of "induce policy change" I would have said "take an action." By making policy the descriptor of what may be coerced you almost by definition limit coercion to governments of some sort. I think by most definitions of coercion individuals may be coerced as well.]

He goes on:

A target that does not believe it will pay a price or that fails to understand the potential consequences of noncompliance is unlikely to comply with the coercer's demands. To be effective, therefore, coercion requires that the target be able to make a rational assessment of its choices. Unless the target is concerned with the outcomes of its choices, has a preference ordering over those outcomes, and chooses policy based on anticipated outcomes, coercion is impossible.

This is a remarkable statement. Coercion is possible - by definition - only where a rational choice can be made. 

This strikes me as a peculiar definition of coercion. Mice that are trained in a lab with electrical shocks to prefer one form of behavior over another - they're rational?

William James says that human actions are usually motivated by an amalgam of thinking and feeling inextricably mixed together. My guess is that emotion plays an important role in coercion. Consider the following example: a ruler has 500 of his subjects captured. The bad guys threaten to kill one subject per day until the ruler agrees to turn over 100 pounds of gold to them. Or whatever. The ruler refuses and each day one subject is killed within sight of the ruler's walls. The ruler's resolution is strong, however. One day, however, the ruler's mother dies, it rains all day, and he falls down the stairs and hurts himself badly. The next morning, weighed down by grief, depressed by the weather, tortured by pain, the ruler submits and sends out the gold.

Did the ruler act rationally? Did the coercion work because of a rational weighing of costs? Is this scenario somehow wildly at odds with human behavior or extremely unlikely in some other way? Is this not coercion (because emotion affected the ruler's choice)?

Lake seems to be saying that any time a person chooses they are taking a purely rational action. Choice is, by definition, rational. This is not the way I understand choice at all.

Choice is the fateful selection of one action over another by a process that is as likely to be mysterious in retrospect as it was at the time. In many instances the only rational part of choosing is the rationalizing that goes on afterward in an attempt to convince ourselves that we had a reason for what we did. 

[In fact, this ex post facto rationalizing is a well-attested and closely studied phenomenon of human behavior. See, for example, chapters one and two of Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis.]

When someone says, "You're overwrought. Don't decide now. Wait until tomorrow and then see how you feel." We don't accuse such a person of talking gibberish or acting crazy. This is the sort of advice that is so unexceptional that it is a commonplace. These words make the place of emotion in decision making - and our acknowledgement of that place - clear.

 I find the way in which rational choice theorists blandly ignore considerable common sense and a fair amount of scientific research breathtaking.