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JohnnyYou » Today, 6:32 am » wrote: ↑

Today, 6:32 am

Revisiting the domain of losses: Trump’s case in foreign policy and beyond
Hillary was interviewed this weekend..  She mentioned a psychological process known as the domain of losses..

It's a vicious wipe out function on the Dunning Kruger Function..  Once people start losing, they can't make rational decisions and keep doubling down on worse decisions. Prospect Theory is new to me today.

https://pecuniaetbellum.com/2025/10/16/ ... nd-beyond/
 By Theodoros Apostolos KoutsoumpasDonald Trump returned to the presidency of the United States almost a year ago. In such a brief period of time though, he has moved away, or threatened to do so, substantially from many of the positions that underpinned American foreign policy for decades. Limiting or cutting support for Ukraine in the war against Russia while embracing Kremlin as reasonable partner, being on the process of imposing tariffs to European and American allies while pressing them to spend more on their defence and interfering in the Israel-Iran conflict are some of the foreign policy highlights of his tenure so far. The results have been the decrease of trust among America’s allies, a more uncompromising Russian stance in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, a free rein in Israel’s ambitions and Middle East again in turmoil.Answering the question of whether all these actions truly signify or will ultimately lead to a changed international environment is not the purpose of this article. However, it can be commonly admitted that Trump opts for some changes to happen. And not necessarily simple things, but a great part of the architecture of the international system which, in his view, fails to serve the American interests. Putting it in IR jargon, he wants a change in status quo. In other words, he thinks that the US is losing.If we are (once more) to rephrase this idea, Donald Trump believes that the United States is in the domain of losses. This is the part where prospect theory, a theory describing decision-making at risk conditions enters the room. The domain of losses is one of its key concepts that have been used, along some of its other descriptive schemata, in understanding foreign policy decision-making. In many occasions however, this and many other behavioral and psychological theories have been applied in International Relations in a way against their conceptual bases. Revisiting the concept of the domain of losses and its relation with Trump’s foreign policy helps to draw wider and interesting conclusions about the application in IR of theories that do not share the mainstream ontological and epistemological canon.Firstly, one should define prospect theory in order to trace the possible relations between foreign policy decision-making and the domain of losses. As said above, prospect theory is a behavioral (psychological in essence) theory that deals with decision-making under risk. It was developed by Kahneman and Tversky in 1979 in an effort to address the shortcomings of expected utility theory that was the dominant model in describing how people make decisions (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). The main idea behind prospect theory is, to put it simply, that the individual does not always decide among different prospects by weighting their net assets, i.e. the probabilities of each one to happen. Rather than that, the individual frames their decision around a personal reference point (describing the status quo) in relation to which they identify if they are in the domain of gains or in the domain of losses. Being in the domain of gains is generally connected to the adoption of risk-averse behavior while being in the domain of losses is associated with a risk-acceptant mentality (Levy, 1992).