The idea that the way people characterize or represent a situation or problem is important in the solving of that problem has been proposed by various researchers (Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin 1954, 1962; Simon 1981; Voss, Green, Post, and Penner 1983; Pennington and Hastie 1986; Purkitt and Dyson 1988; Premkumar 1989; Voss, this volume). These studies indicate in various ways that people establish representations and explanations of phenomena about which a decision is required, and that these representations vary not only according to individual and circumstance but also according to the actual choice or choices made.

Some empirical studies focusing on group decision making in foreign policy have suggested that how a group defines a problem significantly affects how it chooses to deal with that problem (Purkitt 1992; Sylvan and Thorson 1992), yet the processes involved in coming to some representation of a foreign policy decision problem in a group setting have not been addressed. What factors shape and influence the interaction of different individual perspectives on a foreign policy problem is an important research question if we are to understand the policy-making process and the influences on policy decisions.

The implications of adopting a problem-representation perspective on group decision making in foreign policy are many. It might reveal, for example, implications about the actual processes involved in the formation of foreign policies, or it might provide new perspectives on the centrality of alternatives and preferences in that decision-making process. Further, as problem representations are generally considered as being prior to the generation of solutions, findings suggesting a prominent or central role for representations at the group level may suggest that defective or poor decision making may reside not with the way preferences and alternatives are handled but with the assumptions that guide the generation, evaluation, revision, and selection among those preferences and alternatives. Indeed, various remedies for defective decision making may miss the mark in that they are ways of avoiding pathologies that are caused not by conflict among preferences but by competing, conflicting, or complementary problem representations. Understanding the role of problem representations and their interaction and aggregation in the foreign policy group could provide alternative ways of understanding such phenomena.