About the event: We use survey experiments to explore a variety of different contexts and how they affect the choices a decision maker might have to make about using nuclear weapons. One set of surveys explores the relationship between expected casualties and the willingness to use nuclear weapons. The result is clearly increasing support for nuclear use as expected casualties in a difficult conventional war increase. We also explore how the alternatives given to a decision maker influence choice. More specifically, we show that when the option not to launch nuclear weapons is presented along with three options to use those weapons, more people select not to launch. Overall, we also find clear evidence of consistent differences between democrats and republicans as well as a strong relationship between decision makers’ punitive tendencies and their support for using nuclear weapons. Implications for risk management and policy will be discussed.

About the speakers:

Rose McDermott:
Rose McDermott is the David and Mariana Fisher University Professor of International Relations at Brown University and a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She directs the Watson Postdoctoral Program. She works in the area of political psychology. She received her Ph.D.(Political Science) and M.A. (Experimental Social Psychology) from Stanford University and has also taught at Cornell and UCSB. She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the Women and Public Policy Program, all at Harvard University, and has been a fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences twice. She is the author of six books, a co-editor of two additional volumes, and author of over two hundred academic articles across a wide variety of disciplines encompassing topics such as American foreign and defense policy, experimentation, national security intelligence, gender, social identity, cybersecurity, emotion and decision-making, and the biological and genetic bases of political behavior.

Paul Slovic:
Paul Slovic is a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a founder and President of Decision Research. After 47 years, he has rejoined the Oregon Research Institute as a senior scientist. He holds a B.A. from Stanford University (1959) and an M.A (1962) and Ph.D. (1964) from the University of Michigan. He studies human judgment, decision making, and the psychology of risk. With colleagues worldwide, he has developed methods to describe risk perceptions and measure their impacts on individuals and society. His recent work examines "psychic numbing" and the failure to respond to mass human tragedies. He is a past President of the Society for Risk Analysis and in 1991 received its Distinguished Contribution Award. In 1993 he received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association He was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016. In 2022, Dr. Slovic received the Franklin Institute’s Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in the Science of Decision Making.

Sharon Weiner:
Sharon K. Weiner is an Associate Professor in the School of International Service at American University as well as a Visiting Researcher for the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University. Sharon's research, teaching, and policy engagement are at the intersection of organizational politics and U.S. national security. Her current work focuses on the theory, practice, and social construction of deterrence, the politics of U.S. nuclear weapon modernization programs, and larger issues of civil-military relations. Her most recent book, Managing the Military: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and Civil-Military Relations (Columbia University Press, 2022) analyzes the power of the JCS chairman to help or hinder the president's ability to implement their defense policy preferences.  She also collaborates with Moritz Kutt (Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg) on The Nuclear Biscuit (thenuclearbiscuit.org), a virtual reality experience involving a nuclear crisis. The project analyses how people make high stakes national security decisions under conditions of uncertainty.

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