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ABSTRACT
International relations (IR) studies on humanitarian intervention have debated both the nature and strength of intervention norms. This article contributes to this debate by exploring under what conditions individuals are willing to support military humanitarian intervention (MHI) and the psychological factors that influence whether, and the degree to which individuals support MHI. Taking a psychological approach, we hypothesized that individuals’ decision to support MHI is influenced by in-group favoritism and emotional responses to in-group suffering. We tested our theory with two experiments, each of which recruited roughly 200 American participants. Both experiments centered on the ongoing Syrian civil war and assessed Americans’ willingness to support intervention to protect different civilian groups. The results suggested that support for intervention was widespread, but not a majority view in most cases. The findings also suggested that participants exhibited slightly higher rates of support for intervention when those suffering were Christian, as opposed to Muslim. Furthermore, we found that the dynamics of support for intervention changed when chemical weapons were introduced into the scenario, which reframed the the crisis as a national security issue. Overall, our results suggest that individuals’ decisions to act upon norms can be influenced by the context of a crisis and individual level psychological factors, which have been under explored in IR scholarship on norms.
Acknowledgments
Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2013 International Security Section Annual Conference in Washington, DC, and the 2014 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association in Toronto. We thank David Traven, Stuart Kaufman, Danielle Langfield, Jessica Boscarino, JoAnne Myers, Danielle Villa, Gregory Carmichael, and the anonymous peer reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.
Funding
Schreiner University and Marist College provided generous financial support for this project.
Supplementary data
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.
Notes
1 When conducting experiments, the general practice is to have a minimum of 30 participants per condition, which we exceed. Furthermore, our N size is more than adequate for the statistical procedures we use (for example, ANOVA requires a minimum of 15 cases per group and regression 30 cases total).
2 Because ANOVA results suggested that the UNSC authorization variable did not meet the homogeneity of variance assumption, nonparametric tests were conducted to confirm that there was a difference. A Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA and Mann-Whitney U post hoc test produced results similar to the original ANOVA.
3 Bootstrap confidence intervals are now the common way to measure the indirect effect in mediation models. They are useful for examining mediation models with smaller samples because the test is based on a resampling method. In PROCESS, the default setting is to conduct 1,000 resamples to calculate the indirect effect.
4 We also tested for an interaction effect between females and the women and children frame on negative affect, which was not significant. Likewise, for the Christian frame we tested for interaction effects for being Christian and the Christian treatment on both negative affect and support for intervention, both of which produced nonsignificant results.
5 E2 factor loadings and reliability estimates for negative affect and religiosity items were similar to those of experiment 1: four PANAS-X items (varimax rotated loadings ≥ .85, α = .910, M = 9.18) and RC-10 (varimax loadings ≥ .77, α = .951, M = 16.52).