Anne Harrington, Ph.D.

HarringtonA1@cardiff.ac.uk

Associate Professor

Cardiff University

Year of PhD: 2010

City: San Antonio, Texas

Country: United States

About Me:

Dr. Anne I. Harrington is a senior lecturer (associate professor) in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Cardiff University. She teaches on nuclear strategy and nonproliferation. Students in her classes learn, for instance, how to develop informed opinions about US policy towards Iran and North Korea. Anne earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2010. Since then she has held fellowships at major universities in the US and Europe, including the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. In 2013-2014, she worked for the United States Congress as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, first as a National Security Fellow in the office of Senator Kirstin Gillibrand (D-NY) and then at the Congressional Research Service. Her publications have appeared, among other places, in Foreign Policy, Task & Purpose, and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Anne is married to Brigadier General Brenda Cartier, USAF. She splits her time between San Antonio, Texas, where Brenda is Vice Commander of the 19th Air Force, and Cardiff, Wales in the UK. When they are not working, Anne and Brenda enjoy annual trips to European Christmas markets, visiting the beach in Florida, and hiking the coastal trails in Wales.

Research Interests

Nuclear Weapons

Irregular Warfare

Women In Combat

Nuclear Nonproliferation/counter-proliferation

Countries of Interest

Iran

Publications:

Books Written:

(2019) Behavioral Economics and Nuclear Weapons, Anne Harrington and Jeffrey Knopf, eds., University of Georgia Press

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. This collection of essays applies the insights of behavioral economics to the study of nuclear weapons policy. Behavioral economics gives us a more accurate picture of how people think and, as a consequence, of how they make decisions about whether to acquire or use nuclear arms. Such decisions are made in real-world circumstances in which rational calculations about cost and benefit are intertwined with complicated emotions and subject to human limitations. Strategies for pursuing nuclear deterrence and nonproliferation should therefore, argue the contributors, account for these dynamics in a systematic way. The contributors to this collection examine how a behavioral approach might inform our understanding of topics such as deterrence, economic sanctions, the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and U.S. domestic debates about ballistic missile defense. The essays also take note of the limitations of a behavioral approach for dealing with situations in which even a single deviation from the predictions of any model can have dire consequences.