About

Jonathan Mercer (Ph.D., Columbia University) is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. He specializes in international relations with an emphasis on international security and political psychology. His current research addresses racism in international politics. Mercer has published on topics such as 'prestige' in the journal International Security and on various aspects of emotion in International Organization and International Theory. His book, Reputation and International Politics, received the Edgar S. Furniss Award for an exceptional contribution to the study of national and international security. He has been a fellow at multiple prestigious institutions, including the Center for International Relations at the London School of Economics, the Danish Institute for International Security in Copenhagen, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard, the Center for International Relations at UCLA, and the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford. Additionally, he was an SSRC-MacArthur Fellow in Peace and Security.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Economics
• Medicine
• Positive economics
• Psychiatry
• Optics
• Geography
• Political economy
• Physics
• Social psychology
• Law
• Materials science

Selected publications

• Accounting for repeat intervention costs in the economic comparison of laser interstitial thermal therapy and anterior temporal lobectomy for treatment of refractory temporal lobe epilepsy

  Epilepsy & Behavior · 2024 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Medicine
  • Psychology
  • Psychiatry
  PublisherDOI

• Racism, Stereotypes, and War

  International Security · 2023 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Abstract Racism systematically distorts policymakers’ analyses of their allies’ and adversaries’ capabilities, interests, and resolve, potentially leading to costly choices regarding war and peace. When policymakers hold racist beliefs, as they did in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), their beliefs influence how they explain and predict their allies’ and adversaries’ behaviors. Reliance on racist stereotypes leads policymakers to inaccurate assessments. An analysis of the relationship between stereotypes, reputations, and bigotry indicates that reputations easily become stereotypes—which is discomforting to anyone who bases policy decisions on another's reputation or encourages policymakers to do so. International security scholars have largely overlooked the role of racism, assuming rational choices on the part of policymakers. Research demonstrates that this assumption is wrong.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Acknowledgments

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2021

  • Geography
  DOI

• Open Community Challenge Reveals Molecular Network Modules with Key Roles in Diseases

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2018-01-01 · 13 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The Illusion of International Prestige

  International Security · 2017-04-01 · 82 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Policymakers and international relations scholars concur that prestige is critical to world politics because states having prestige enjoy greater authority. An examination of how policymakers assess their and other states' prestige, however, reveals that this traditional view of prestige is wrong, for two reasons. First, policymakers do not analyze their own states' prestige, because they feel they already know it. They use their feelings of pride and shame as evidence of their state's prestige. Second, political and psychological incentives encourage policymakers to explain another state's behavior in ways that make it unlikely that states gain prestige. Policymakers systematically discount the prestige of other states; a belief that their state has earned the respect and admiration of others is therefore illusory. Consequently, the justification for costly prestige policies collapses. In other words, states should not chase what they cannot catch. Evidence from the South African War supports this conclusion.

  PublisherDOI

• Psychology and Security

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies · 2017-12-22 · 4 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Psychology plays a key role in the success of strategy and is therefore important to the study of international security. There are four general approaches to the psychology of strategy. The first focuses on personality, and more specifically on individual differences, cognition, and the use of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience to investigate human nature. The second approach draws on deterrence theory, which considers how an actor can keep a target from doing something it would otherwise do. A political psychological perspective on deterrence consists of three elements. First, psychological approaches to deterrence reject stimulus–response models and instead lay emphasis on understanding cognition and emotion. Second, deterrence is a policy rather than a philosophy. Third, whereas normative theories explain how one ought to behave (and thus cannot be disconfirmed by evidence), psychological theories change in response to new evidence, such as with the development of prospect theory. The third aspect of strategic interaction involves learning and intelligence assessments. Based on this approach, how people learn, what they are likely to learn, and the problems of assessing the intentions and capabilities of others are central to strategy. The fourth and final approach is concerned with the strategy of group conflict, which has generated two waves of research: the first analyzed how material inequality or competition for resources gives rise to psychological forces that result in group cooperation and between-group competition, and the second added nonmaterial causes to explain group relations.

  PublisherDOI

• INT volume 6 issue 3 Cover and Front matter

  International Theory · 2014-10-09

  articleOpen access

  International Theory (IT) promotes theoretical scholarship about the positive, legal, and normative aspects of world politics respectively. IT is open to theory of all varieties and from all disciplines, provided it addresses problems of politics, broadly defined and pertains to the international.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Feeling like a state: social emotion and identity

  International Theory · 2014-10-09 · 329 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Can one use emotion at anything other than the individual level of analysis? Emotion happens in biological bodies, not in the space between them, and this implies that group emotion is nothing but a collection of individuals experiencing the same emotion. This article contends that group-level emotion is powerful, pervasive, and irreducible to individuals. People do not merely associate with groups (or states), they can become those groups through shared culture, interaction, contagion, and common group interest. Bodies produce emotion that identities experience: group-level emotion can be stronger than, and different from, emotion experienced as an individual; group members share, validate, and police each others’ feelings; and these feelings structure relations within and between groups in international politics. Emotion goes with identity.

  PublisherDOI

• ‘Psychological Constructivism’: Comment on Iver Neumann’s ‘International Relations as a Social Science’

  Millennium Journal of International Studies · 2014-09-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Iver Neumann’s assessment of IR as a social science reaches a counter-intuitive conclusion: ‘The issue is not if we should engage biological and psychological thinking about our subject matter, but how we should do it.’ His conclusion is counter-intuitive because, following Weber, Neumann believes that ‘social facts should be explained by social factors’1 and IR is above all else, social. Yet biology is a natural science and psychology walks the line between the natural and the social. So how does one privilege the social yet incorporate the natural to explain phenomenon of interest to IR? I cannot say what Neumann has in mind, but a psychological constructivist approach to emotion captures his call to draw on (what Neumann terms) the competing disciplines of psychology and biology to create a better social science of international relations. What makes emotion (and psychology) interesting and challenging is that it is not real (as a discrete measurable entity), but it is real as an identifiable experience. Psychologists have tried and failed to match discrete emotions like ‘anger’ to the brain and body. Emotions are not ‘natural kinds’ – they are not observer-independent. Psychologist Lindquist observed that one hundred years of psychological research ‘has yet to identify the discrete bodily, facial, behavioral, or neural basis of English emotion categories such as “anger,” “disgust,” “fear,” “happiness,” and “sadness”’.2 Emotion depends on the body, as well as on culture and context. Had scientists paid more attention to social

  PublisherDOI

• Emotion and Strategy in the Korean War

  International Organization · 2013-04-01 · 148 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract What makes a diplomatic or military signal credible? In strategic settings where deception is possible, rational actors' interpretations rely on their beliefs, intuition, and imagination—they rely on emotion. Two properties of emotion—as an assimilation mechanism and its use as evidence—are key to addressing four strategic problems. First, emotion explains why actors worry needlessly about their reputations. Second, emotion is important to understanding costly signals. Third, emotion explains radical changes in preferences. Fourth, emotion sharpens understanding of strategic problems without being self-invalidating: common knowledge of emotion's effects do not always change those effects. Understanding how rational actors think requires turning to emotion. Evidence from the Korean War captures strengths and weaknesses of competing perspectives.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kasper Lage

  Novo Nordisk (United States)

  12 shared

• Zoltán Kutalik

  9 shared

• Ted Natoli

  9 shared

• Rajiv Narayan

  9 shared

• David Lamparter

  9 shared

• Sven Bergmann

  SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics

  9 shared

• Daniel Marbach

  9 shared

• Aravind Subramanian

  University of Toronto

  9 shared

Labs

• Department of Political Science, University of WashingtonPI

Education

• Ph.D.

  Columbia University

Awards & honors

• Edgar S. Furniss Award for an exceptional contribution to th…
• SSRC-MacArthur Fellow in Peace and Security