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This chapter considers self-monitoring, which assesses the extent to which people modify their behavior in response to the social context. In a climate governed by tolerant beliefs, analysts of public opinion face concerns about the accuracy with which attitudes and beliefs in sensitive domains (for example, race, sexuality) are measured. The chapter argues that self-monitoring can be useful in understanding which respondents are motivated to misrepresent their real preferences in surveys, and moreover presents several intriguing analyses that point to the value of self-monitoring in understanding responses to socially sensitive political topics. It proposes a question battery to account for how people's personality characteristics affect the answers they give to questions involving politically controversial topics.

This chapter studies the question of children's motivations to engage in pretence, using an account provided by Nichols and Stich in 2003 as a stalking horse. It argues that they are correct about much of the basic cognitive architecture necessary to explain pretence, but wrong on the question of motivation. Following a discussion of the views of Currie and Ravenscroft in 2002 on this issue, the chapter draws on Damasio's 1994 description of the way in which emotions enter into practical reasoning involving mental rehearsal. It concludes by defending a novel explanation of the motivations underlying pretence.

The ways in which healthy habits are formed and maintained over time, as well as the ways in which health-harmful habits can be extinguished, are the topics of this chapter. The principles of classical conditioning as they relate to health behaviors are reviewed. Then, following the operant conditioning framework, the important elements of reward (and punishment), along with the advantages and limitations of various schedules of reinforcement, are discussed. Included in this chapter are many practical suggestions for incorporating habit-changing tools into one’s daily routine, and a discussion of common barriers encountered by those attempting to change their habits—and how to overcome these barriers. The utility of external commitments (e.g., behavioral contracts and contingency contracts), along with the potential risks associated with external techniques (such as the reduction of intrinsic motivation), are reviewed. The importance of social support, choosing supportive environments, self-monitoring, and being mindful are highlighted.

This chapter begins with a review of the requirements for monitoring the progress of students in special education and aligns this with single-case research designs. First, five federal requirements are reviewed. Second, establishing a baseline for individual functioning is described in four ways: ensuring that measures are understandable to parents and students; using a variety of measures; triangulating the measures to make certain that they truly represent the student's performance level; and being sure to state the baseline in positive terms. Third, the requirements for measurable annual goals are described, including the environmental conditions, specific services needed, the identity of the student, defined actions, and performance criteria. Finally, the chapter provides details on how to evaluate student progress using Excel. It focuses on the requirements in the dependent and independent variables; experimental manipulation; visual analysis techniques; student self-monitoring; and how to improve the social validity of the single-subject research.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the concept of reputation for resolve. A state’s reputation for resolve is the belief that during crises, the state’s leaders will take actions that demonstrate willingness to pay high costs and run high risks, and will thus stand firm in crises. Leaders who project or protect a reputation for resolve signal that they are willing to use military instruments in order to affect others’ beliefs about their willingness to stand firm. The historical record suggests that leaders and their closest foreign policy advisors often hold divergent views about whether reputation for resolve is worth fighting for. This book then offers an alternative analytical framework in explaining such variations of views that focuses on psychological dispositions and beliefs of national leaders. Importantly, by attributing variation in willingness to fight for reputation to variation in individuals’ self-monitoring, it shows that fighting for reputation has prepolitical origins.

This chapter discusses what self-monitoring is, and how and why individuals differ in their self-monitoring dispositions. Self-monitoring concerns the extent to which individuals strategically cultivate their public appearances. A very large body of scholarship reviews how individuals differ in the extent to which they monitor and control their self-presentation in social situations. The literature distinguishes between two ideal-types of individuals: high self-monitors and low self-monitors. On average, high self-monitors are more likely to be concerned about reputation for resolve compared to low self-monitor individuals, and those tendencies could be moderated by overall dispositions about use of force. The chapter then explains how individuals’ beliefs about the efficacy of military force have an important intervening effect on whether a given leader will fight for reputation. It classifies leaders with regard to their willingness to use military instruments for international reputation into four ideal-types: reputation crusaders, reputation believers, reputation skeptics, and reputation critics.

This chapter presents two cross-national survey experiments that explore the relationship between self-monitoring characteristics, beliefs about the efficacy of force, and concerns for reputation for resolve. The first survey consists of two thousand American adults recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), whereas the second survey is conducted on a nationally representative sample of Israeli Jewish adults. Obtaining almost identical results in each study, the chapter found that the interaction between self-monitoring and general predispositions toward the use of force produces systematic differences in support for the use of force. These findings carry significant implications for the ability of leaders to mobilize domestic support for the use of force: when leaders are able to frame an international conflict in reputational terms, a segment of the population that would not otherwise be convinced about the use of force is likely to become more supportive of military engagement.

This chapter looks at original surveys of sixty-eight presidential historians on the president each had studied in depth. The historians’ survey suggests that American presidents exhibit variation in their self-monitoring dispositions. The chapter then leverages this variation to test statistically whether US presidents’ behavior during international crises is consistent with the expectations of the theory presented in this book. The self-monitoring disposition of a US president is a significant predictor of his likelihood of employing and initiating military instruments to demonstrate resolve during international conflict. Low self-monitor presidents not only engage in less militarized interstate disputes, but they are also significantly less likely to initiate such disputes, compared to high self-monitor presidents. The chapter also presents findings indicating that high self-monitor presidents are more likely to prevail in militarized interstate disputes compared to their low self-monitor counterparts.

This chapter explores historical case studies as part of a layered methodological approach. It uses three observable implications to code a president as believing strongly in the efficacy of force: a preference for higher military spending, a preference for covert military action, and a preference for military solutions over diplomatic ones. Beliefs about the effectiveness of military force capture the president's views regarding use of force in general. Thus, as the theory suggests, those views might affect the propensity to fight for reputation, but that effect is deterministic, because it interacts with the president's self-monitoring disposition. The chapter then explains how evaluating the self-monitoring, hawkishness, and policy recommendations of the presidents' main advisors offers several significant benefits to the research design.

This chapter examines Jimmy Carter and several of the international crises he faced during his presidency that many observers argue risked the United States' reputation for resolve. Unlike those of most of his predecessors or successors, Carter's discourse and policies seem to show that he was not motivated by projecting resolve for the sake of reassuring allies or intimidating adversaries. In fact, evidence from primary documents reveals that Carter's behavior during international crises corresponds closely to the reputation critic ideal-type. The chapter then reinforces the classification of Carter as a reputation critic using additional qualitative evidence in the form of Carter's personal diary and prepresidential speeches, memoirs written by his advisors, and other secondary literature. It also uses available biographical evidence to illuminate the self-monitoring tendencies of Carter's closest advisors: National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.

This chapter assesses the extent to which reputational concerns shaped President Ronald Reagan's discourse, decision making, and policies during international crises. It focuses on four of these international crises: the escalation in Afghanistan, the intervention in Lebanon, the invasion of Grenada, and the air strikes against Libya. Each posed a challenge, real or perceived, to US reputation for resolve and so are good tests of the dispositional theory. A review of Reagan's self-monitoring tendencies and beliefs about the use of force place him closest to the ideal-type high self-monitor hawk, and thus, one should expect his behavior to be consistent with that of a reputation crusader. However, his behavior and discourse during the crises covered cannot be convincingly explained simply by highlighting his hawkish tendencies. In order to fully appreciate Reagan's policies, rhetoric, and state of mind, one must look at how these hawkish tendencies interacted with his high self-monitoring disposition.

This concluding chapter summarizes the book's findings and suggests avenues for future research. At its core, the book makes the case for why leaders should matter to international relations, and also how they matter. Leaders' characteristics significantly shape their behavior on the international stage, but current scholarship lacks clear direction as to what characteristics are important and how those traits affect crisis decision making and international behavior more broadly. The book advances this research agenda by exploring the relationship between self-monitoring, military assertiveness, and contests of “face.” Although prominent in the field of psychology, self-monitoring has unfortunately remained largely unexplored to students of world politics. Self-monitoring should be of significant importance to international relations scholars who study signaling and perception in international politics, but there is also much to be gained by applying the concept of self-monitoring beyond studies of security.

High self-monitors are people who act like “social chameleons”: they change the way they present themselves depending upon who they are with. In contrast, low self-monitors are simply themselves: they don't try to be “all things to all people.” In initial interactions, the partner who scores higher in self-monitoring tends to speak first, to initiate more conversation sequences, and to use the other person's behavior more as a guide. High self-monitors also tend to use a higher percentage of second-person (“you”) pronouns and to reciprocate their interaction partner's disclosures. High self-monitors run the risk of appearing phony, however, when they try too hard to impress an attractive, opposite-sex partner.

This chapter highlights health apps. Health apps primarily perform three functions: they monitor, measure, and manage. The first generation of apps were largely about self-monitoring. These “do it yourself” kinds of apps had users record and consider their own data—food ingested, mood, glucose levels—and offered these users opportunities to modify their behavior. Next came measuring, quantifying apps, which soon became sensor-based, including recordings of heart rate, steps walked, sleep stages, and food labels. Such sensors limited manual input and offered novel “health” markers to monitor. It is now the era of the “prescribable” app—an app for the treatment of managing conditions anytime, anywhere. Some of these apps have even been recommended by health providers. The most commonly trialed apps are those that are designed to address conditions with the largest global health burden: diabetes, mental health, and obesity. However, of all the health apps on the market, only a few dozen have ever been tested using randomized trials. Thus, there is a need for efficacy assessment, a reliable source of quality information—a Consumer Reports for health-related apps—and a recognized national organization that can evaluate and decide which are useful and safe. Even a modestly effective app, if available to millions of users, could have an enormous impact on the public’s health.

Stress is a notoriously slippery concept and experience: something many of us talk a lot about, and have a strong physical sense of, but which is difficult to grasp scientifically or medically. Human stress responses are complex and can be traced in multiple physical processes and changes, as well as in mental and emotional life. Attempts to biosense the physical signs of stress are inevitably bound up with these complexities, and reflect the multiple uncertainties of contemporary science and clinical medicine on this issue. Despite this, devices to monitor stress are increasingly available and are being taken up in various contexts, including workplaces such as the military and financial trading. In this chapter we explore how biosensing platforms articulate ‘stress’ and suggest how these devices and platforms might be used to further a bio-psycho-social understanding of human and non-human life.

This chapter continues where the previous one left off, although it looks at a different case setting. The discussion focuses on the patients' need to start doing a certain behavior and continue doing it over time; this is called the complex behavior of self-monitoring. The “self-applying” motivation comes into play in this scenario. It can be noted that while these two cases seem different, the same motivational dynamics apply, as these both need effective long-term self-regulation in order to achieve a potentially important health benefit. The patients would also need to behave in a way in which they are initially unwilling to behave.

This chapter examines the neurological mechanisms by which we recognize actions as our own and how a sense of self may emerge from action. It considers how we feel in control of our actions and the ability to attribute one’s own actions to the self. It discusses evidence from studies that have explored our consciousness of the consequences of our actions and how this “self-monitoring” system distinguishes between self and other. In particular, it reviews psychological research on the conscious experience of willed action and neurophysiological experiments that probed its possible underlying processes. In addition, it looks at studies of patients with disorders of volition to illustrate how disruption of the self-monitoring system may disturb the normal experiential link between intention and the awareness of volitional control.