President Donald Trump’s COVID-19 illness, and the treatments he received, raise serious concerns about the adequacy of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to handle cases of transient presidential incapacity. This is particularly challenging when the president refuses to acknowledge any impairment and resists any attempt to constrain his powers, even temporarily.

Originally developed by applying models from cognitive psychology to the study of foreign policy decision making, the field of behavioral IR is undergoing important transformations. Building on a broader range of models, methods, and data from the fields of neuroscience, biology, and genetics, behavioral IR has moved beyond the staid debate between rational choice and psychology and instead investigates the plethora of mechanisms selected by evolution for solving adaptive problems. This opens new opportunities for collaboration between scholars informed by rational choice and behavioral insights. Examining the interactions between the individual's genetic inheritance, social environment, and downstream behavior of individuals and groups, the emerging field of behavioral epigenetics offers novel insights into the methodological problem of aggregation that has confounded efforts to apply behavioral findings to IR. In the first instance empirical, behavioral IR raises numerous normative and philosophical questions best answered in dialogue with political and legal theorists.

Although both the idea and the reality of so-called fake news or disinformation campaigns long precede the Trump administration, the frequency and intensity of the discussion around its prevalence and influence have increased significantly since Donald Trump took office. In an era when technological innovations support increasingly inexpensive and easy ways to produce media that looks official, the ability to separate real from artificial has become increasingly complicated and difficult. Some of the responsibility for public manipulation certainly rests with those who present false or artificial information as real. However, their relative success depends on, at least in part, universal psychological processes that often make humans susceptible to believing things that are not true. For example, people often weigh emotional feelings more heavily than abstract facts in their decision making. This discussion examines the psychological foundations that render individuals susceptible to a post-truth media environment and allow it to emerge, escalate, and persist.

Economic exchange constitutes the basis of many, but not all, aspects of human cooperation. The incentives overlap with, but remain distinct in important ways, from other fundamental aspects of cooperation, including the organization of collective violence for combat. The specific alignment of sometimes-conflicting goals helps inform the construction of political ideology.

Experiments offer a useful methodological tool to examine issues of importance to political scientists. The historical and cultural differences between experiments in behavioral economics and social psychology are discussed. Issues of central concern to experimentalists are covered, including impact versus control, mundane versus experimental realism, internal versus external validity, deception, and laboratory versus field experiments. Advantages and disadvantages of experimentation are summarized.

The current research climate provides an auspicious opportunity to undertake foundational investigations at the intersection of the natural and social sciences to produce transformative work with broad import for society. A great deal of relevant work examining the genetic, neurobiological and neuropsychological bases of social and political behavior has already taken place. But much of this work has been conducted simultaneously in a variety of different fields and disciplines. In addition to needlessly duplicating some research paradigms, thus wasting time and resources, such efforts have often also lacked a coherent core of social and political models and theories to guide such inquiry. With proper coordination and leverage, such efforts can achieve tremendous gains in terms of harnessing the skills, methods, and models of the natural sciences in service of addressing some of the most destructive and endemic social and political problems which plague our planet.

The optimal functioning of male coalitionary behavior in a military context may run contrary to some of the arguments about the importance of individual differentiation in Baumeister et al. Incentives become institutionally inverted within military contexts. Because the history of combat exerted powerful and sustained selection pressures on male groups, individual identification can work against the successful completion of collective action problems surrounding in-group defense in military contexts.

Greater theoretical consensus and cohesion could offer critical insights for the broader community of international relations scholars into the role that gender plays in spawning and sustaining processes of violence. This review essay examines the role of gender in generating and perpetuating violence and aggression, both in theory and practice. I make four central claims. First, in many studies involving the role of sex and gender in violence, specific causal models tend to remain underspecified. Second, a divergence in fundamental assumptions regarding the ontological basis of sex differences implicitly permeates and shatters this literature. Third, arguments that men and women are more or less likely to fight appear too simplistic; rather, it is worth considering that men and women may possess different motivations for fighting, and fight under different circumstances and for different reasons. Finally, systematic differences in the variant psychologies of men and women regarding the relative merit of offense and defense exert predictable consequences for public opinion surrounding the conduct of war in particular.

Political concerns often compromise the delivery of high quality medical care in ways that can be both problematic and dangerous for political leaders. President John F. Kennedy's medical care offers a particularly rich exposition of the many ways in which these dynamics can play out and how additional factors can complicate matters, such as when the patient is himself duplicitous, when family members try to intervene in care, and when public exposure risks political future. This article examines the politics and management of Kennedy's medical conditions by the various physicians involved in his care and explores how these considerations may have compromised not only the quality of his care but, in turn, exerted an influence on his behavior. This happened not only through the downstream effect of his treatment on his thoughts and behavior but also through the tremendous allocation of time and attention that his care required—attention a healthier man would have been able to direct toward problems of greater national concern.

Although still more common in medical studies and some other areas of social science such as psychology and behavioral economics, experimental work has become an increasingly important methodology in political science. Experimental work differs from other kinds of research because it systematically administers a specific treatment to part of a population while withholding that manipulation from the rest of a subject pool. The best studies strive to keep all other aspects of the experiment similar, so that any emergent difference between the treatment and control group that emerge provide unparalleled traction in determining causal inference. Many other valuable forms of social research use observation of the natural world, rather than depending on intervention to advance understanding. Because experimentalists can create the environment or process they want to study, this strategy of intervention and manipulation constitutes the main distinction between experimental work and other forms of social observation.

Because political science draws heavily from other disciplines—psychology and economics—in its use of experimental methods, we often fail to note how each experimental tradition developed in ways, while serving those field's primary goals, that often present contradictory imperatives that may not serve political science equally well. I provide a brief history of experimental traditions in psychology and economics, and then suggest, in all humility, an integrated set of best practices for the use of experiments in political science.

One of the important perspectives that feminist analysis has brought to the study of politics is the value of the individual and the importance of capturing individual experience in our understanding of large social and political forces. Simple aggregation of individual experience can lose the richness of that reality. Yet the normative adherence to the critical appreciation of each person's life and experience need not prevent us from drawing inferences from patterns of behavior in order to help us intervene to improve the lot of those who suffer in the wake of systematic prejudice or discrimination.

We explicate the precise role that one specific emotion, disgust, plays in generating political acrimony. We do this by identifying the link between the different dimensions along which moral judgments are made by those espousing different political ideologies and the different emotions which undergird these evaluations. These assessments reliably track along liberal and conservative dimensions and are linked to the way values associated with purity and sanctity elicit greater degrees of disgust among conservatives. Here, we review a growing literature showing how disgust affects the psychology of politics through its influence on the cognitive and emotional processes that govern judgments of morality, as well as its direct impact on specific policy preferences. We then apply these findings to the nature and tenor of political discourse and suggest some ways that disgust might affect the character and function of democratic debate and tolerance. Finally, we discuss what these findings mean for public policy.

Intersectionality has long been a cornerstone of feminist discussion and scholarship around the world (McClintock 1995; Rao 2012). But the concept itself—intersectionality—continues to demand additional explication, interrogation, and development. In 2005, Politics & Gender published a Critical Perspectives on intersectionality that generated a great deal of interest and debate. A recent mini symposium in Political Research Quarterly coedited by Evelyn Simien and Ange-Marie Hancock (2011) further extended this discussion, providing contributions from across subfields in political science to enrich the theoretical arguments and empirical explorations of topics that intersect and combine issues of sexual orientation, race, gender, class, and national origin across the world. This Critical Perspectives seeks to build on these foundations by contributing additional empirical and theoretical attention to the ways in which intersectional analysis can render certain experiences of oppression invisible or seemingly out of the bounds of politics.

One of the concerns that has plagued research on the biological and genetic underpinnings of social behaviors and individual differences is the fear that such information can be used for ill. This fear rests on a foundation of good reason. Early abuses involving the use of selective phrenology and other purportedly “scientific” methods to establish moral hierarchies among races or between sexes have exerted profound and lasting damage on society, as well as affecting later attempts to more productively examine the biological bases of individual difference. And yet, many policies that have focused exclusively on social factors have created equal pain and suffering, although these approaches have rarely fostered as much discussion. However, despite these negative outcomes, biological research can also attack diseases, alleviate suffering, and dispel social myths that wrongfully assign blame to the victim or otherwise oversimplify behavior. Here, we argue for a similar positive valuation of such an approach in political and social research. We concentrate not on the ethics of conducting this research, but rather the ethical need for this research to be conducted.

We argue for the importance of adequately distinguishing between the concepts of sex, gender, and sexual orientation. We review the literature across disciplines to suggest ways that political scientists might benefit by taking into account important biological distinctions in addition to cultural factors regarding sex, gender, and sexuality in their research. We clarify the distinction between these concepts in an effort to help reduce discrimination and defuse misconceptions, stereotypes, and imposed social roles. We believe that it would be fruitful for us as a discipline to better communicate this research to the wider public in the hope that public opinion and elite discourse will shift in a more tolerant and positive direction as a result.

I have been extremely blessed in my life to have benefitted from some amazing mentors and friends in both psychology (most notably, Amos Tversky, Phil Zimbardo, and Leda Cosmides) and political science. Inspired by the occasion of Robert Jervis' festschrift, which importantly does not signal his imminent retirement, I was prompted to take advantage of this opportunity to express my deep and abiding appreciation for his advice and guidance over the years. In keeping with Kristen Monroe's model of three, I also reflect here on the critical roles that two additional mentors, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Peter Katzenstein, have had on my career and my life.