Adaptive Decision-Making Process in Crisis Situations

Abstract

This chapter highlights the importance of a communication in crisis situations such as the COVID-19 and provides an outlook on how psychological tools could be deployed to strengthen interpersonal skills and improve the cooperation between scientists and diplomats. A sustainable science diplomacy requires the capacity for empathy and compassion, an ability to build and foster working relationships, and an awareness of the importance of cooperation between scientists and politicians/diplomats. Scientists and politicians together need to develop and apply a public information strategy in support of their common efforts to manage crisis and solve problems. We need to restructure concepts, constructs, techniques, and strategies of public policy and diplomacy, adapting them to this new era of global communication that shapes the public context within which events unfold as the COVID-19 experience has showed. More precisely, the focus will be on science diplomacy as a useful means to give a strategic impetus to international relations and on how the science of applied cognitive psychology could help shed new light on adaptive decision-making and have an effective impact on connecting the worlds of science and diplomacy.