The canonical responses to the zombie threat suggest that human beings cannot be reduced to bloodless calculating machines, despite the assumptions of ractional choice theorists. All individuals have fears, foibles, and failings that cause behavior to deviate from how a dispassionate, rational decision maker would behave. First-image theorists look at these tendencies in human behavior and see whether they translate into recurrent patterns in world politics.
There are a cluster of cognitive attributes hardwired into all humans that might affect policy responses to an uprising of the living dead. Perhaps the most powerful is the tendency for confirmation bias in processing new information about a phenomenon.5 All individuals have ideologies, cognitive heuristics, or rules of thumb they use to explain how the world works. When confronted with an unusual or anomalous event, most people will focus on the bits of information that correspond to their preconceived worldviews.