Seeking Security: Threat Perception and Policy-Making in a Dangerous World | Marika Landau-Wells

About the Event: How do U.S. policy-makers develop national security strategy in the face of newly emerging dangers?  And why are many of these strategies deemed ineffective?  In my book project, Seeking Security: Threat Perception and Policy-Making in a Dangerous World, I examine the way in which the cognitive processes associated with threat perception influence policy-makers’ preferences for specific, but sometimes incompatible, national security policy measures.  My theory linking threat perception to policy preferences is grounded in an original meta-analysis of the neuroscientific literature on human threat perception, as well as in extensive evidence from biology and cognitive science on threat learning and threat response.  In this talk, I will discuss the theory alongside data from two chapters covering the design of NSC-68 and its successor national security strategies during the early Cold War.  I combine an original corpus of digitized archival documents and new tools from natural language processing to show that much of the individual-level variation in preferences for how best to counter Communism can be traced back to differences in beliefs about the kind(s) of threat that Communism posed.
 
About the Speaker: Marika Landau-Wells is an Assistant Professor in the Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley.  She received a PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she held a postdoctoral fellowship in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the SaxeLab.  For the 2021-2022 academic year, Dr. Landau-Wells was a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution.  Her research is broadly concerned with the effects of cognitive processes - including perception, attention, learning, and memory - on political behavior and foreign policy decision-making.

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