Behavioral Economics and Nuclear Weapons

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Anne I. Harrington, Jeffrey W. Knopf
University of Georgia Press, 2019 - Political Science - 214 pages

Recent discoveries in psychology and neuroscience have improved our understanding of why our decision making processes fail to match standard social science assumptions about rationality. As researchers such as Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and Richard Thaler have shown, people often depart in systematic ways from the predictions of the rational actor model of classic economic thought because of the influence of emotions, cognitive biases, an aversion to loss, and other strong motivations and values. These findings about the limits of rationality have formed the basis of behavioral economics, an approach that has attracted enormous attention in recent years.


This collection of essays applies the insights of behavioral economics to the study of nuclear weapons policy. Behavioral economics gives us a more accurate picture of how people think and, as a consequence, of how they make decisions about whether to acquire or use nuclear arms. Such decisions are made in real-world circumstances in which rational calculations about cost and benefit are intertwined with complicated emotions and subject to human limitations. Strategies for pursuing nuclear deterrence and nonproliferation should therefore, argue the contributors, account for these dynamics in a systematic way. The contributors to this collection examine how a behavioral approach might inform our understanding of topics such as deterrence, economic sanctions, the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and U.S. domestic debates about ballistic missile defense. The essays also take note of the limitations of a behavioral approach for dealing with situations in which even a single deviation from the predictions of any model can have dire consequences.

 

Contents

Introduction Applying Insights from Behavioral Economics to Nuclear Decision Making
1
Chapter One Testing a Cognitive Theory of Deterrence
25
Decision Making at the End of the Nuclear Chain
56
Lessons for US and Chinese Doctrine
78
Rational Choice before the Unthinkable
100
Insights from Behavioral Economics
115
Chapter Six Justice and the Nonproliferation Regime
135
An Information Processing Account of Technology Innovation
159
Chapter Eight Homo Atomicus an Actor Worth Psychologizing? The Problems of Applying Behavioral Economics to Nuclear Strategy
187
Contributors
203
Index
207
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About the author (2019)

ANNE I. HARRINGTON is a lecturer in international relations at the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University. JEFFREY W. KNOPF is a professor and program chair of nonproliferation and terrorism studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and a senior research associate with the institute's James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

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