Ideology and Risk: The Neuroscience of Nuclear Reversal

• In Event: The Politics of Nuclear Weapons: Enduring Challenges, New Methods

Abstract

How does neural activity in high-risk decision contexts vary between ideological liberals and conservatives? Relatedly, how do these neural differences (or lack thereof) manifest in behavior, namely, the decision to provide opportunities to an opponent for nuclear reversal? We integrate three bodies of literature to develop an innovative framework of nuclear decision-making, including: (1) international and nuclear security, pertaining to the behavioral outcome of interest (i.e., nuclear reversal); (2) political psychology, indicating the mechanism through which reversal outcomes can vary (i.e., political ideology); and (3) cognitive neuroscience and neuroeconomics, by which we discuss the neural factors likely to be driving varying ideological dispositions and preferences (i.e., variance in neural activity in strategic decision-making between liberals and conservatives broadly). We isolate the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and hypothesize that when bargaining risk is high, ideological liberals, relative to conservatives, are more likely to experience higher brain activation in regions of the brain associated with positively valanced information and reward. Conservatives, relative to liberals, are more likely to experience high brain activation in regions of the PFC associated with punishment and negatively valanced information. We test the theory with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and find support for our theory.

Authors

• Ingrid Haas, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

• Rupal Mehta, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

• Noelle Troutman, Arizona State University