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8 WINNING THE WAR OF WORDS The issue of risk in decision making is magnifi ed in the realm of international politics where actors decide their foreign policies. 17 Therefore, it is diffi cult to ignore cognitive approaches and the contributions they offer to the analysis of decision making under risk. Human decision makers are unable to act entirely in a manner that fi ts rational rationality assumptions. Emotions, culture, and human cognitive limitations play too large a role in decision making, especially risky decisions, for rational choice theory to be able to explain how people actually behave. Risky decisions are based on a variety of decision rules, which cause dif- ferent outcomes. 18 Kahneman and Tversky developed prospect theory as a response to the fact that rational choice based models of decision making could not explain why people behave differently from the ways prescribed by normative decision- making theories. Expected utility theory states that the probability of each outcome in risky situations is known and individuals weight the utilities of outcomes by the prob- abilities and choose the highest weighted term. Kahneman and Tversky found expected utility theory to be empirically incorrect on that note. The descriptive foundations of prospect theory are (1) people think about gains and losses around the reference point or their aspiration level rather than net assets (2) individuals are risk-averse with regard to gains and risk-acceptant with regard to losses (3) there is a refl ection effect around the reference point at which the losses seem greater than gains (4) people’s sensitivity to change diminishes as they move fur- ther away from the reference point in either direction (at the same time, gains are treated differently from losses people hate losing more than they like winning) 19 and (5) there is an overevaluation of current possessions, also called the endow- ment effect. This endowment effect can be strengthened by the symbolic value of political or economic assets. 20 Endowment effect is not only a challenge to expected utility theory, which assumes that preferences stay uniform it can also have signifi cant real-world impact. If an actor perceives a territory to be his in spirit but not in any legal sense, then he may be more risk-acceptant in acquiring that area. This type of change in preferences is a violation of rational choice tenets. 21 Prospect theory argues that individuals evaluate outcomes with respect to deviations from a reference point rather than with respect to net asset levels, thereby making the reference point an important variable. Decision makers judge gains and losses based on their reference point, an activity that can play a crucial role in changing situations. Unlike rational choice, which takes the reference point as fi xed, a tenet of prospect theory is that the reference point is established during the framing phase. 22 The framing phase can affect an actor’s conceptual domain. Actors perceive values in the domains of gain and loss differently and are more sensitive to losses than to gains, which leads to loss aversion. The political implication of loss aversion is that a negative event activates further efforts that can be risky and lead to even greater losses, regardless of the net value of assets. Loss aversion in political life may not be entirely cognitive. In domestic politics, an actor may try to increase his chances of winning a reelection