Ranking international cooperation and conflict events

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Abstract
A set of psychological laboratory experiments were conducted to refine a scale that could be used to study cognition and decision‐making in international cooperation and conflict events. The COPDAB scale, ranking international conflict and cooperation, was expanded and reanalyzed. The original 15 point scale was augmented to include four actors and three new categories for nuclear conflict. The new 18 point scale was used as a template to generate separate sets of action and message items. These items were administered in alternative orders and ranked by political science graduate students and psychology undergraduates. There were four major sets of findings. 1) Action and message items across all 18 ranks provided separate and similar scaling outcomes. 2) Cooperative items in the bottom 7 ranks continued to be difficult to rank properly. They were given cooperative values, but did not increase monotonically across experimental ranks. 3) Conflictual items in the top 10 ranks increased more regularly across scale categories. The observed values were closer to expected results, except for the borderline between conventional and nuclear weapons. The conflictual portions of the two 18 point action and message scales can be used with prudence. Well behaved items may be appropriate for psychological experiments with particular applicability to 4 party scenarios previously in Germany and Vietnam, presently in Korea. 4) Anomalous items provide valuable information about the scope and limits of ranking international events, with particular reference to wording effects. These 4 sets of findings are relevant to a number of different areas of inquiry: international events data; psychological laboratory experiments on cooperation and conflict; symbolic politics, including political rhetoric, political communication, political linguistics, and natural language processing. Most importantly, they bring us a step closer to replicating the complexity and variation of real world international perception and decision. As they do so, they help us toward a more sophisticated understanding and a better theory of cooperative and conflictual international interactions.

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