The version of record of this article appears in The Globe and Mail.
By Megan Shipman and David Mitchell
Megan Shipman is a behavioural neuroscientist and a research fellow with the Cascade Institute’s polycrisis program at Royal Roads University. David Mitchell is the Cascade Institute’s impact lead.
The U.S. President has said his attack on Venezuela and threats against other neighbours are motivated by a policy of hemispheric domination he calls the “Donroe Doctrine.”
Neuroscience, however, suggests a further motivation: the Dopamine Doctrine.
American foreign policy, by this view, is no longer driven by national interest, or even naked self-interest, but instead by Donald Trump’s hunt for dopamine rewards, conditioned by recent high-stakes military strikes on Iran and Venezuela.
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama recently observed that with Mr. Trump today, “the usual tools international observers bring to foreign policy analysis – political science, economics, sociology, and the like – are not nearly as important as psychology, both individual and social. The evolution of Trump’s policies can only be understood in relation to his own mind and motivations.”
Canada must now grapple with the reality that our nuclear-armed neighbour is menacing the world to neurochemically reward a solipsist who recently declared that “my own mind” is “the only thing that can stop me.”
To confront the threat, we first need to get inside that mind – with some help from neuroscience and learning theory.
Learning theory tells us that rewards shape behaviours. We’ll repeat rewarded behaviours, and refrain from punished behaviours. At a neurochemical level, those rewards release the feel-good neurochemical dopamine.
Dopamine neurons in the brain respond to rewards in the environment. Generally, the larger the reward, the more dopamine released. But the element of surprise matters even more than the size of the reward: dopamine neurons will stop responding to a reward once we’ve learned to expect it, and respond more forcefully when a reward exceeds our expectations.
Dopamine prediction error, as this phenomenon is called, helps explain why behaviours tend to escalate, sometimes in harmful ways: a reward we’ve come to expect doesn’t cut it anymore.
Mr. Trump, who feeds on reactions, has been conditioned to provoke even more extreme reactions to get the payoff he’s looking for. Each successful escalation raises the reward expectation threshold. And each greater reaction reinforces his increasingly dangerous behaviour.
While commentators commonly reach for the language of addiction and tolerance to explain Mr. Trump’s destructive tendencies, learning theory is more useful for understanding what motivates behaviour.
Tolerance describes physical adaptations that make a drug dose less effective over many uses, requiring a higher dose to cause the same initial effects. This pattern is well-established with commonly abused drugs, but controversial for behavioural addictions such as gambling.
Reward prediction error, however, describes the way dopamine reward neurons respond to reinforcers. It’s a critical process during learning: a surprising reward leads us to repeat the preceding behaviour.
Last June, Mr. Trump struck dopamine gold with Operation Midnight Hammer, a hit-and-run bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities followed by a quick declaration of truce and a stubborn claim of victory.
Mr. Trump’s attack on Venezuela follows the same pattern: months of escalation, a lightning attack, a hasty retreat, and a declaration of victory.
Riding the high, Mr. Trump has since threatened Greenland, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Iran, and Canada, revelling in the resulting outrage.
Dopamine-seeking behaviour loops often self-correct because rewards for excessive indulgence are accompanied by punishment. Drink too much and you’ll suffer a killer hangover, and maybe a blooming sense of shame over some barely remembered transgression. This mix of rewards and punishments bounds our behaviours.
But Mr. Trump, uniquely shameless, powerful, prosecution-proof, and adored by his base, insulates himself from such punishment. And he seems to enjoy both positive and negative attention, so praise and censure alike scratch the itch.
Most worryingly, Mr. Trump’s aggression has gone largely unpunished, reinforcing his self-perception as a decisive winner.
So how do you short-circuit the Dopamine Doctrine? Condemnation from United Nations members doesn’t cut it. Condemnation from other nations, even NATO allies, doesn’t cut it – he’s long expressed his disdain for multilateralism.
The only way to break the cycle is to create a genuine cost that matters to Mr. Trump. The loss of his base, say, or the loss of his donors. Public humiliation, bond market panic, or military defeat.
At the neurochemical level, when Mr. Trump’s actions are less rewarding than he expects, a negative prediction error leads him to reverse course. Hence the acronym “TACO”: Trump Always Chickens Out.
The Dopamine Doctrine suggests that Mr. Trump will pursue larger and larger hits – not just to get the reaction he craves, but to exceed the reaction he expects. When recent hits include bombing capital cities, seizing oil tankers, and perp-walking a head of state, no one is safe.
