Replication Data for: The Damocles Delusion: The Sense of Power Inflates Threat Perception in World Politics

How does power affect threat perception? Drawing on advances in psychological research on power, this paper finds that the sense of state power inflates threat perception. The sense of power activates intuitive thinking in the decisionmaking process, including a reliance on gut feelings and cognitive shortcuts like heuristics and prior beliefs. In turn, psychological IR research shows that these mechanisms tend to inflate threat perception. The powerful assess threats from the gut rather than head. Experimental evidence from the US and China, a re-analysis of a Russian elite survey, and a large-scale text analysis of Cold War US foreign policy elites lend support to this expectation. The findings help to psychologically reconcile enduring theoretical puzzles -- from underbalancing to overextension -- and generate entirely new ones, like the possibility that decisionmakers of rising, not declining, states feel greater fear. Together, the paper offers a "first image reversed" challenge to bottom-up accounts of psychological IR. Decisionmakers are also dependent variables shaped by the balance of power, with important implications for a world returning to great power competition.