Determining Support for Humanitarian Interventions: Prospect Theory versus Cues

Abstract

To what extent can prospect theory’s framing effects and elite and social group cues moderate public support for humanitarian interventions? This study extends the research on public support for humanitarian interventions by capturing the interaction between prospect theory’s framing effects and elite and social group cues on individuals’ willingness to support risky foreign policies. The study incorporates four novel prospect theory decision problems while framing the expected costs as nonequivalent intervals across interventions and US–China trade war scenarios. The results provide evidence that prospect theory framing effects outperform the elite and social group cues in their ability to induce preference shifts among respondents’ willingness to support risk-acceptant or risk-averse humanitarian intervention plans. It also suggests that humanitarian interventions, with US troops on the ground, in a region noncentral for America's national security, retain substantial levels of support among Americans despite their country's changing role in international security.