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Why do leaders, institutions, and states make the decisions they do? International Relations scholars are increasingly recognizing the importance of psychological and other decision-making approaches to understanding world affairs, particularly the crafting and implementation of foreign policy. In this course, we examine individual cognitive biases and heuristics, organizational culture, groupthink, and other dynamics that produce often surprising, suboptimal outcomes in international politics. A major purpose of the course is to think broadly about ways in which these approaches can help inform theoretical work done by political scientists and policy analysts to provide more nuanced understandings of otherwise confounding cases of foreign policy decision-making. We will also draw from numerous empirical examples of crisis decision-making, major foreign policy shifts, and intelligence failure across time and space to evaluate the relative efficacy of various approaches in explaining specific cases.