| Behavioral Economics and Nuclear Weapons Subjects: Nuclear weapons -- Economic aspects; Economics -- Psychological aspects; Nuclear weapons -- Government policy; Deterrence (Strategy); Nuclear nonproliferation; Military policy -- Decision making; Economic policy -- Decision making; 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. Anne I. Harrington (Editor) ANNE I. HARRINGTON is a lecturer in international relations at the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University. Jeffrey W. Knopf (Editor) 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. |