Our Gift

This chapter describes strategic instincts as rapid, adaptive decision-making heuristics that all human beings have and are not achieved by accident. It elaborates how strategic instincts keep people alive and successful over the many millennia of human evolutionary history and in fast-moving situations of uncertainty. It also confirms the continuation of the same strategic instincts that serve as tools of survival for individual human beings and the nations they lead, significantly in times of crisis and war. The chapter focuses on whether and when cognitive biases cause or promote success in the realm of international relations. It discusses the interpretation of cognitive biases that appears to be exacerbated by focusing on disasters and looking at isolated events.