Speakers
Overview
This MDM lunch examined decision-making under pressure at three levels of analysis: the individual body, the small political group, and the multi-actor institutions of the EU. One speaker presented research on how acute and chronic stress alters the balance between fast, automatic responses and slower, deliberative ones in the brain and body. A second examined foreign policy crisis decision-making, focusing on how domestic political institutions and small group dynamics shape the choices leaders make under time pressure and uncertainty. A third presented process-tracing research on how EU institutions navigate slow structural crises that resist the kind of summit-level punctuation the system handles well.
Key Points
Under acute threat, the balance shifts from the executive control network toward the salience network, and in doing so promoting fast, vigilant responses that can be adaptive in genuine danger, but undermine deliberation when reflection would be superior. Notably, with chronic stress exposure, this shift can become structural.
In foreign policy crises, centralization of decision-making narrows the circle of participants, amplifying the role of individual our leaders and small groups, but the quality of outcomes depends heavily on much of the informal dynamics, not just formal power structures. Leaders often avoid challenging the “informal expert”, a non-interventionist tendency that compounds “groupthink”.
The EU system handles acute crises well, as it has learned to mobilize quickly, but it does still struggle with slow structural challenges like climate change, defence, and industrial decline, where the attention of our political leaders must be sustained across several years, rather than summits.
The "fight the last war" heuristic is pervasive under extreme pressure: when the choices need to be made fast, the first response is always what worked last time; this makes analogical reasoning both a cognitive shortcut and a source of systematic error in new crises.
Open question: Can the psychophysiological markers of individual stress responses, like freezing or autonomic imbalance, be detected or even predicted in political leaders, and if so, what would that mean for how we design decision-support systems around them?
Next Steps
Possible collaborations: linking individual-level stress physiology with group-level and institutional-level decision-making research, and exploring whether real-time physiological monitoring could inform crisis management protocols in high-stakes settings.
If you are interested in decision-making under pressure and would like to connect with the speakers or suggest a speaker for another session, contact us at centerfordecisionscience@ru.nl.