Eduardo Missri Honors Seminar 02/11/08
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the differences between men and women in foreign policy decision making. The study focuses on the differences in biases in decision making, the differences between satisficing and maximizing approaches by both genders, the differences between strategy selection, and the difference between holistic and nonholistic decision making by both genders. The findings demonstrate, that both men and women have similarities and differences in various aspects of the decision making process. The importance of these findings is also discussed in this paper.
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Introduction Women and men have always had vast differences between themselves in many aspects. The physical aspect is the most noticeable one, where we can clearly see the differences between both sexes. In the modern world, gender equality is growing and people tend to see men and women as equal. This has created an erroneous perception that women and men are the same. As equality between the sexes has had an important advancement in human kind itself, clear differences between men and women have created the perception, that males and females are the same and most importantly think the same. Various studies (Schubert, Conner, Hoag, and Goldstein et al.) have shown contradicting evidence when trying to prove the differences amongst genders. Some psychological studies contradict neurological research and vice versa. In this paper I will attempt to discover differences and/or similarities between genders in decision making processes in order to further examine if these differences may affect practical situations and the role that gender plays in such processes.
Decision making theories such as rational choice are utilized in order to explain how humans make decisions and they also explain the process by which people go through in order to reach
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