Renewed Interest in People’s Responses to Nuclear Weapons

• Authors: Astrid Kause (Princeton University, Leuphana University of Lüneburg/University of Potsdam), Helen Fischer (Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien), Zia Mian (Princeton University), and Susan Fiske (Princeton University)
• Title: “People’s Responses to Nuclear Weapons: Mapping Post-Cold War Research”
• Journal: Perspective on Psychological Science

In spring 2024, Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security (SGS) hosted a semester-long reading and discussion series focused on nuclear psychology. The goal was to understand the different individual and social-psychological responses previously collected by researchers about nuclear weapons and potential nuclear war.

“Nuclear weapons are back in the global debate,” said Zia Mian, co-director of SGS. “Whether it’s ordinary people, activists, scientists, policy analysts, media, movie makers and writers, governments, or the United Nations, there is a shared sense that the world faces nuclear dangers many felt had been left behind by the end of the Cold War.”

That undertaking led to renewed interest in understanding how researchers document risk perceptions, attitudes, feelings, and behaviors in response to the world’s current nuclear state.

The resulting research, “People’s Responses to Nuclear Weapons: Mapping Post-Cold War Research,” provides the first comprehensive systematic mapping of the field and literature review in almost four decades. The mid-1980s was the last time that psychologists, including Susan Fiske — now a Princeton professor emeritus in psychology — assessed the overall state of understanding of individual responses to nuclear weapons. Fiske is a co-author of the new study.

“We asked how much research has been done and by whom over the past 40 years,” Mian said. “How good is the evidence, and what can we reliably conclude about people’s responses to nuclear weapons? What are research gaps? What is the state of the field?”

The research team identified two important findings in this first piece, which maps the patterns of four decades of research activity. Future papers will address key results in more detail. 

First, public responses to nuclear weapons and policies have recently been observed largely through a political science lens, whereas a psychological viewpoint, as Fiske used in the 1980s, might provide more insight into the individual mechanisms involved in people’s responses to nuclear weapons today.

Second, previous research in this area has often focused on Western societies, most notably the United States, Britain, and Europe. A more global approach, including the Global South, where most people in the world actually live, and especially regions around the world affected by nuclear weapons activities, would provide a more robust sampling.

“We found very few recent studies on psychological responses, such as risk perceptions, worry, anxiety, or political activism, which are key to understanding people’s structures of feeling and thinking and behaving when it comes to nuclear weapons,” Mian said. “This field has become and remains a niche research area, despite widespread concerns about nuclear weapons. This is a very different picture from the state of research into people’s responses to other global challenges, such as climate change.”

“We note some overall implications for this field of research,” Mian said. “First, many psychologists were active researchers in this field, especially in the later years of the Cold War, and the discipline engaged with nuclear weapons issues through its professional bodies. Psychologists could usefully focus again on nuclear weapons. We need new research and to retest and, if needed, to adapt well-established understandings, if we are to draw meaningful conclusions about people’s responses to nuclear weapons today, to understand how people are responding worldwide, and especially the most vulnerable and those already harmed. It is possible we can learn from research into people’s responses to climate change and other global challenges.”

The team is also looking to build a more “cohesive and interconnected interdisciplinary scientific community that aims at a comprehensive understanding of people’s beliefs, feelings, actions, and knowledge about nuclear weapons and nuclear policies,” according to Mian.

“This will help science better inform the global effort to address the dangers nuclear weapons pose to humanity,” he said.