imagined security: threat perception and policy-making in a dangerous world
When new dangers emerge – as SARS-CoV-2 did in 2020 – or peripheral security concerns become priorities – as terrorism did after Sept. 11, 2001 – what influences the strategies policy-makers pursue in response?
I argue that in these moments, individual policy-makers’ preferences for how their governments should respond matter a great deal because institutional mechanisms for coping with new dangers are often minimal. Instead, these are moments when the cognitive processes associated with threat perception exert significant influence over individual-level preferences for national security strategy. And, because only a handful of individuals shape policy at these moments, these preferences are consequential. The strategies developed in these moments are also consequential because they embody new theories of how to keep the nation secure and can result in substantial redirection of government resources. The origins of these strategies are thus worth understanding.
At the outset of Imagined Security, I develop a theory of the cognitive processes that are engaged when individuals are confronted with potential dangers. I meta-analyze evidence from dozens of neuroscientific studies to characterize the brain-level basis of threat perception. I show that the brain parses danger into at least three categories: physical harm, loss (material and non-material), and contamination (literal and metaphorical). Given this structure, I argue that individual perceptions of danger vary in two ways: threat detection (is something dangerous?) and threat classification (how is it dangerous?). Breaking somewhat with the existing literature, I argue that threat classification is the more significant form of variation when it comes to national security decision-making outcomes. In combination with predictions grounded in behavioral biology, I introduce Threat-Heuristic Theory (THT), which links threat classification along the three dimensions of physical harm, loss, and contamination to a small set of predictable preferences for specific danger mitigation strategies. While the mapping between threat classification and mitigation strategies is relatively generic (e.g., preventive aggression as a response to unavoidable attack), I argue that there are national security policy equivalents (e.g., preventive war) and that individual-level preferences for these specific features of national security strategies (e.g., preventive war as defined in the 2002 NSS) can be predicted.
I test these predictions experimentally and observationally across five empirical chapters. Three of these are case studies of the responses to three emerging dangers: Communism after World War II, terrorism after September 11, 2001, and climate change (ongoing). Across the book, I rely on a variety of data sources, including archival material, observational and experimental survey data, interviews, large speech corpora, and functional magnetic resonance imaging data.