Can a Leopard Change Its Spots? Implicit Theories and Signaling in International Politics

States' ability to communicate their motives credibly, and infer another state's motives accurately, is central to understanding conflict and cooperation in international politics. Rationalist models have long assumed that actors in international politics rely on costly signals to communicate about motives. Building on the concept of attribution from psychology, this paper shows that the costly signaling mechanism rests on particular assumptions about how recipients attribute a sender’s behavior. Integrating rationalist arguments with findings from attribution research in social and cultural psychology, notably the role of implicit theories and self-construal in attribution, I develop hypotheses about who is most likely to attribute sunk-cost signals in accordance with these assumptions and thus respond to costly signals the way rationalist theories predict. The findings from a cross-national survey experiment with over 1700 participants provide partial support for the costly signaling hypothesis and show that attributional biases found in interpersonal contexts in psychology do not necessarily extend to interstate interactions. Yet, the findings also suggest that individuals’ attributional patterns vary, with significant implications for the risk of conflict escalation in international politics.