Identification of Prestige Motivation in International Crises
In international crises,decision-makers formulate effective countermeasures by identifying the motives of the adversary.One of the challenging motivation identification tasks is to determine the adversary's prestige motivation.Specifically,decision-makers sometimes identify prestige motivation as the one playing a dominant role in the adversary's decision-making,while at other times they determine that prestige motivation plays only a minor role.The author thus explores the conditions under which decision-makers judge prestige motivation to be the dominant(or secondary)motive of the adversary.According to the Prestige Motivation Identification Theory,decision-makers judge prestige motivation to play a dominant role in the adversary's decision-making when either(1)decision-makers judge the adversary to be highly irrational and the importance of the adversary's material in-terests involved in the crisis to be high,or(2)the decision-makers judge the adversary to be low in irrationality and the importance of the adversary's material interests involved in the crisis to be low.In other cases,the decision-makers would judge prestige motivation to play only a minor role in the adversary's decision-making.A process-tracing study of two cases,the Abyssinian Crisis and the Berlin Wall Crisis,verifies the validity of this theory,contrib-utes to the understanding of compromising behavior in international crises,and sheds light on the formulation of sound prestige policies.
international crisesmotivation identificationprestige motivationthe Abyssinian Crisisthe Berlin Wall Crisis
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