Long ago at a university far away, I used to study neuropsychology. Most of my work focused on how individual voters make decisions about political candidates and how they adjust those decisions to in response to new information (that and how monkeys decide to throw poop--no joke). While the specifics have largely part faded from my memory I do remember this:

Human decision making is rational with two important caveats: First, rationality is based on access to information; without complete information, it’s impossible to be completely rational. Second, our emotions affect the way we initially process information which can later jade decision making.

While applications for behavioral neuropsych are generally limited in IR, I’ve seen this precept in action more times than I care to count.  All other things being equal, countries are rational actors. The problem is that rarely are those other things equal. More often than not, countries fail to understand each other’s motivations and thus regularly make decisions based on incompletely knowledge.

A prime example is Iran’s analysis of who is shaping America’s Iran policy. According to Jon Lee Anderson’s recent interview with Hossein Shariatmadari, a trusted adviser to Khamenei and editor-in-chief of Kayhan, a hard right publication associated with the Iran’s clerical establishment, our Iran policy is shaped by four guys:

The Green Movement, he said, was part of a grand conspiracy—conceived by, among others, Michael Ledeen (a veteran foreign-policy hawk), Richard Haass (the president of the Council on Foreign Relations), Gene Sharp (an authority on nonviolent resistance), and George Soros (the financier and philanthropist)—with the aim of overthrowing Iran’s government. The protests were not against Ahmadinejad, he explained, but “against the whole system.” Fortunately, “the people” had been mobilized and had stopped the conspiracy in its tracks.

(Check out the rest of Anderson’s New Yorker piece on the current Iranian political environment here)

As Daniel Drezner explains, Shariatmadari’s analysis is preposterous:

Seriously, Ledeen and Haass loathe each other, and Ledeen and Soros probably loathe each other even more.  None of these guys have any direct influence over Iran policy, and I'm willing to bet that Ledeen and Soros' indirect influence is exactly nil. Now, take a moment to imagine a world in which Ledeen, Haass and Soros  are secretly meeting to overthrow the Iranian regime, and I guarantee that the color of the sky in that world is not blue.

At least we can give the Iranians credit for consistency. The Iranian intelligence community has implicated Soros and Sharp in a wide variety of plots against Iran for years now. See the hilarious VEVAK propaganda video below for details.

-Evan