CANCELLED: Virtual Reality and Crisis Decision Making

Talk is cancelled. We hope to reschedule in Fall 2020 or Spring 2021.

SSP Wednesday Seminar series with speaker Sharon Weiner, American University.

Nuclear deterrence assumes that decision makers will respond rationally in a crisis, carefully weighing the pros and cons of any retaliatory options.  Yet much of the literature from foreign policy crises suggests, instead, that people rely on a variety of heuristics that mean choices are often the result of emotions, biases, or other less-than-rational factors.  Using a Virtual Reality simulation, I test the degree to which people are prone to these heuristics in a crisis involving nuclear weapons.