 long to our first seminar for this series. This seminar series happens every Wednesday from 12.30 to 1.30. That includes both cutting edge research alongside important quality diversity and inclusion topics. My name, for those of you who don't know me is Amanda Chisholm and I'm the designer and chair of this series. I'm a senior lecturer in gender insecurity across the School of Security Studies. We started this series a few years ago as a way to showcase the diverse and brilliant work our PhD and early career research colleagues are doing across the School. Last year due to COVID, we moved this series online and we were actually able to develop more of a online social media presence because of it. So we've also developed collaboration with international journals. This is where our presenters not only present their work live to you now and it gets recorded, but they also write short blog pieces that get placed on blog series, new voices blog series with international journals. Last year it was international fairs we had a successful collaboration with. And this year we're really excited to be developing this collaboration with critical military studies. So please watch this space for the promotion of this series through the critical military studies virtual journal. Today I'm very excited to introduce Aitin Orin. Dr. Aitin Orin is a scholar in international relations. His research interests lie at the intersections of international security and the human mind. Over the past decade, he's examined when, why and how leaders and government organizations perceive security threats, mostly in East Asia context. The results of his research have been published in numerous international recognized journals, including international relations of Asia Pacific, Japanese Journal of Political Science, Risk and East Asia, Foreign Affairs, Journal of Cold War Studies and the Australian Journal of International Affairs. He's funded by the Gerard Hedkel Foundation, Special Programs, Security, Society and the States. And his research project, his new one, examines how different government organizations in East Asia and Western Europe, democracies and non-democracies evaluate future strategic trends, threats and opportunities and how accurate these assessments were and what were their impact on national security policy making. Dr. Aitin is joined, Orin is joined today by Dr. Ken Payne. Ken is going to act as his discussant. Ken is deputy head and director of research at the Defense Studies Department. He is a reader in international relations and his research is located within political sociology. He just finished writing his fourth book, which is amazing, I'm still on my first, which, and this book considers the ways in which artificial intelligence will change strategy. Earlier books of his have explored the evolution of strategy from apes to early humans to artificial intelligence, strategy in the Vietnam War and the relationship between human evolution and modern liberal warfare. Dr. Payne has consulted for governments of the United Kingdom, United States and the Netherlands. And he's been a NATO research fellow and visiting fellow at Oxford University. A warm welcome to you both. And again, a big hello to all of you in the audience. Today, Aitin's talk is titled Towards a Better Understanding of Threat Perception in International Relations. In this presentation, the main provocation is how do state leaders perceive foreign military threats? So without further ado, Aitin, I'm going to pass the virtual floor over to you and you have slides to share. Yes, I do. I just shared it. I hope you can see my screen. Yeah, it's not in the it's in the format where we can. Yeah, it's not in the presentation. Second. And all right, I think it should be fine now. OK, hi, everybody. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you, Amanda, for the opportunity to present my research. Today and for supporting new voices in the field of security studies. And thank you, Kent, for agreeing on taking the role of discussant for the third time now, listening to my rumble. I really appreciate it. So today I'll be making the following claim. Despite being a crucial factor in both the study and practice of international relations, we still have a fairly limited understanding of threat perception in international relations. And over the next 20 minutes or so, I'll introduce I will introduce seven insights from neuroscience and linguistics into threat perception. And hopefully these insights can help us formulate better questions about this important topic. Now, why is threat perception important? Threat perception plays a central role in theories of war, deterrence, alliance behavior and conflict resolution. And it is the decisive intervening variable between action and reaction in international crisis. So there's lots of reasons why study threat perception. And I'm very much looking forward to your feedback for this talk. So let's start with a little bit of my motivation why I became interested in doing this research. I was born and raised to the left in a village in the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And as the conflict escalated in the late 1990s, 1980s, sorry, like others around me, I became very much aware of the threat of terrorism, which to my mind was associated with young Arab men. That was the environment where we grew up in. And first forward 20 years, I was doing my PhD in Tokyo, having identified my favorite cafe in town. I realized that many of the customers there were young men speaking Arabic. Each time I would go in, I would hear the sound of Arabic and I would instantly feel this familiar sense of danger to my personal safety. Here I was thousands of miles away from the Middle East surrounded by innocent people wanting to have coffee. And yet I was experiencing danger. What was going on? These kinds of questions motivated my interest in threat perception, not only in the context of citizens from conflict areas such as myself, but also in the context of state leaders. Now much has been written about threat perception in international relations. And my focus here is at the individual level. And we can divide the literature into two main accounts. The first one is the rationalist and it assumes that when perceiving threats, leaders and their advisors, select information related to the adversary, capabilities and intention, right? According to this view, threats are out there in the world. And the role of responsible decision maker and their advisors is simply to evaluate them as accurately as possible. Of course, this is not a simple task, but this is the rationalist understanding of threat perception. The second view put forward by a political psychologist is drawn attention to the role of priors in perceiving threats. Those preexisting conditions that dispose observers to perceive threats in some ways, but not in others. And the psychological account also drew intention to the issue of errors or biases, right? Those information processing errors that we have when we think about the world. According to the second view, threats were not just out there in the world, they're also very much dependent on the individual observer. Now, while these two views differ on whether they prioritize objective or subjective elements in understanding threat perception, they also share two main problems. The first problem is conceptual. And here, I'd like to suggest that the classical views that we just described really reduce the phenomenon of threat perception to a unitary category, meaning that all instances of threat perception are essentially the same. And another issue is that these classical views conceptualized threat perception has fixed judgment, fixed over time. And this conceptualization is misguided as I'll show in a minute. The second issue is theoretical. While existing studies tell us about how observers select and interpret information to form judgments about adversaries, we don't have an overall framework of how observers construct reality in the first place. And we don't have a serious attempt to characterize the experience of threat perception. I will again argue that this is an important dimension of this phenomenon. Now, what I'm presenting today is based on a recent working paper that I co-authored with Dr. Matthew Brumer. And we argue in this paper that these problems leave us with a very partial understanding of how individual actually construct security threats. And in order to address these gaps, we draw on two bodies of knowledge. The first is a theory of constructed emotion formulated by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a leading neuroscientist and psychologist, and on the work of Ray Jackendorf, who is a linguist and a cognitive scientist, and specifically on his conceptual semantics framework, which is an overall framework for the theory of thought and meaning. And what we try to do in this paper is to synthesize these two bodies of knowledge and apply them to the issue of threat perception in international relations. And so what I'll do over the time that we have left is really share with you seven insights from these two bodies of knowledge into threat perception in international relations. So the first insight is pretty straightforward. Not all instances of threat perception are the same. Threats, in other words, are diverse categories. And here I'm drawing on Barrett's theory of constructed emotions, according to which emotions vary significantly, both between and within individuals. According to Barrett's theory, no two instances of emotion are identical. They don't have an identical fingerprint in our body. So for example, each occurrence of fear would be associated with a set of different internal changes and sensations in our body. Now, applying this insight to international politics, I hypothesized that a similar dynamic take place. For example, the threat of a nuclear attack would be different from the threat of a cyber attack. And the threat of, say, a Russian cyber attack as perceived by Joe Biden would be different from the threat of Russian cyber attack as perceived by Boris Johnson. And maybe more controversially, as we will see in a minute, the threat of a Russian cyber attack as perceived by Boris Johnson in the late morning might be different from the same threat just after Boris Johnson had his lunch. And I'll explain in a second. The point is that to treat all perceived threats under the same category is highly problematic. The second issue, the second insight, relates to how we construct reality in the first place. And here, the insight is quite clear. Threat perception isn't just a response to external stimulus. And crucial to this process of how we construct reality are two processes called prediction and simulation. And these two processes were discovered by neuroscientists in the late 1990s. And they demonstrated that rather than reacting to the world, what we see and hear and touch and smell in the world are largely simulations of it, hypothesis of the world. And if you think about it, it kind of makes sense. Our brain is locked inside our skull. It has a very limited access to the outside, right? And therefore there is a lot of guesswork being done. And so what the brain does is it uses its past experience with similar situations or objects in our environment and then construct a simulation or in hypothesis. And then what it does, it compares the information arriving via sensory organs to this simulation. That's basically the two main processes that underline all mental activity. Now these discoveries undermine the traditional stimulus response here according to which encountering external stimulus was thought to launch a chain reaction in the brain. Instead, what most neuroscientists believe today is that the brain's 86 billion neurons and the networks that connect them do not simply lie sleeping, dormant, waiting for stimulus to generate activity. Instead, they constantly stimulate each other and provide enough oxygen and nutrients to these cascades of information or stimulation as neuroscientists put it, continue throughout our lifetime. In other words, brain activity isn't so much a reaction triggered by the outside world. It's really a process like breathing, right? It requires no external catalyst. Now again, scholars speculate that simulation underlies not only perception, but all mental activity. And thinking about international politics, just as our brains go beyond available information to construct hypothesis about the world, I suggest that so do our leaders go beyond available information to construct entities in the world as either threatening or non-threatening. And he reminded of Mikhail Gorbachev's farewell address in December 25, 1991, when he stated that an end has been put to the Cold War, the threat of a world war is no more. Very easily, Mikhail Gorbachev dismantles this massive threat of a new, of a world war. Moving to the third insight. Third perception isn't just fixed or continued judgment about an adversary. It's also something that occurs in the moment. It's about the construction of perception in a given moment. And here this is bad news for the rationalist account. How leaders construct threat in a given moment is the result of what goes on inside their bodies as much as by things happening outside the world. This is because just as the brain relies on this process of simulation, the hypothesis to predict the outside world, it also uses simulation to predict the sensations from inside our own bodies. In a process called interoception, the brain uses information arriving from the body, the heart, the lungs, the kidneys and so on, and then represents all sensations from our internal organs and tissues, the hormones in our blood and our immune system. Now this process of interoception has evolved to regulate our body budget and to keep us alive. And it further contributes to what we know as affect, right? Affect those simple feeling of pleasure and displeasure of agitation or calmness. Now the point is when our body budget is unbalanced, our affect prompts our brain to search for explanations. And this is really the interesting part that is relevant for threat perception. If you experience affect without knowing the cause, if you're feeling warm, if your body temperature rises and you're not sure why, you might not even be aware of the reason, you're more likely to treat affect as information about the world rather than simply your experience of it. But this phenomenon is called affective realism and it matters because it has some serious consequences. Let me give you an example from a different profession in the 2011 study of judges presiding over prisoners parole cases. Scholars found that judges were more likely to deny parole to a prisoner if the hearing was just before they went on a break. And you can see it here in the graph. In other words, the judges experience their interceptive sensations, not as hunger or fatigue, but as evidence about the world, evidence about the parole decision, right? And you can see here in the graph that right after they came back from breaks, judges went back to grant paroles with their usual frequency. In other words, even judges aren't the rational beings that we'd like them to be. And their brains, just like ours, very much runs on interceptively infused predictions. Now, going to the issue of threat perception, what kind of implications would an unbalanced body budget might have for threat construction? Consider, for example, the impact of coffee, right? After drinking coffee, most of us tend to feel jittery. If a leader isn't aware of that reason why they feel jittery, they might use that as evidence about the world. Same goes for many other things, such as lack of sleep and so on. In more concrete terms, maybe we should consider what is the best time in the day for leaders to be reading their intelligence assessments about adversaries, right? Whether they should do it right after they have the second espresso intake, maybe they should ask themselves, how do they feel before they engage in these very important tasks? And these kind of questions, I suggest, are very much worthy of research and I'm very much looking forward to your feedback on this point. Next, insight, the fourth one. The brain slash mind likely creates an instant of threat in a given moment through a process of rapid automatic categorization. Now, explain what it means to categorize is to make sensory information coming from outside the world and inside the body meaningful to explain where it came from, what it refers to in the world and how we should act on it. Now, how does the brain does that? This is where Lisa Feldman Barrett's thesis theory is very helpful. She suggests that the brain categorizes using mental concepts, right? Those mental concepts that we have in our minds, which are very much the same as predictions that process that I mentioned earlier. According to the theory, our brains most likely construct concept on the spot, providing a summary of diverse instances from our past that best fit our goal in a given situation. These concepts such as threat are not rigid but they are diverse. They are very much context dependent and as I said, goal based. So for example, one goal in one situation would be to detect danger. Another goal for a different leader if we think about leader would be to mobilize domestic audiences. Now, going back to that experience that I started with that cafe in Tokyo that I would enter in and each time I would go in and hear a certain language my brain likely constructed an instance of fear based on past experience with a terrorist threat and the goal of detecting danger. Having realized that the context was very much different, right? This wasn't the middle east. This was Tokyo. The feeling of threat gradually subsided. Moving to the fifth insight. Once we have an established concept of a certain threat again, either the terrorist threat or as more and more people today seem to be formulating the concept of a China threat, we experienced the danger it poses in three dimensional space. And to see how this works in practice, take a look at this fascinating statement from NATO secretary general following the meeting of NATO head of state last June. Maybe I should read it in case somebody can't read this. Then this is about being able to protect and defend all allies against any threat from any direction because we know that, we see that China is coming closer to us in cyberspace. We see them in Africa. We see them in the Arctic. We see them trying to control our infrastructure. In other words, you can see here between the lines and I've highlighted the important part is that the secretary general experiences the danger posed by China very much in space, right? Spatially, that's the fifth insight. But there is more to our experience of threat than space in addition to experiencing it spatially, we also experience entities in the world with a certain field. In other words, a sense of reality versus unreality, sense of coherence, of familiarity or novelty, of volition and of emotional connection. So we experience entities in the world with fields of positive, neutral, negative or with a feeling of sacredness or feeling of taboo. And I wanna give an example for the second field here. Again, we're talking about the character of experience, how we experience threats. In the private talk held between Japanese Prime Minister, Masayoshi Ohira and his Chinese counterparts on December 5, 1979, Ohira raised concerns about the Soviet military buildup in Japan's northern territories. Those are disputed islands just north of Japan. And this is what he said to the Chinese leader. Recently, the Soviet Union expanded its military power and that poses heavy concerns for our country. Why the Soviet choose this timing is not clear. So we have an acknowledgement of a certain concern, right? We have this frame of danger with which Ohira approaches the issue of Soviet military buildup. But we also have this feeling of incoherence, right? He's not entirely sure why the Soviets are doing what they're doing. So this really goes back to one of those field, the field of meaningless versus meaningful. And the point that I'm trying to make is that these fields that are drawn taken from Ray Jackens of work are crucial for how people experience security threats. And finally, seven insights. In order to conceptualize the world when we think about the world and when we communicate our thoughts to one another, we rely on a set of basic semantic structure. Now, once again, these structures, things like object and location, direction, event and so on are not objective features of the world. They are the basic units with which we think and speak about it. And the fascinating question here is how do these building blocks of meaning combine to produce different perceptions of threat? And I wanna give example, if you can read these two sentences, A and B, and think for yourself, what appears to you more alarming? What conjures a more alarmist image? I'll give you just a second. Now, if you are like most people, the second sentence, example B here in green is deemed more threatening. It is the semantic structure of the present tense, that appears to us to be more dangerous. Even though these two sentences essentially describe the same action, we have a military buildup near a border, but the semantic structure with which we used to describe this action really shapes how we perceive the threat associated with this action. This is the kind of question that I'm interested to be opening up here. So in conclusion, I'd like to bring these things together. In this work in paper, we try to understand or to argue that people and leaders understand and experience threats in much the same process as we predict, simulate, categorize, and experience the world. In other words, we need to bring these disciplines, non-rescience, linguistics on the one hand, and international relations closer together. And I've shared seven insights from these two bodies of knowledge into threat perception. The first is that threat perception is a diverse category, not all instances of threat perception are the same. The second is that threat perception isn't merely a response to external stimulus. Human brain relies heavily on this constant brain activity to predict and simulate both the outside world and the sensations from inside the body. Next time you hear a leader telling you that's how the world is, this is the threat we're dealing with, we should be a little bit more cautious and suggest that that's not actually how this works in our brains. The third is that threat perception isn't fixed over time, right? It's something that constantly changes even throughout the day, right? And then the fourth insight is that the way we construct an instance of threat is through this rapid automatic process of categorization, to categorize, we use mental concepts, right? The fifth insight was that we experienced threat in space. The sixth is that we also experienced with a set of fields that really gives the experience a certain character. And then the seventh one is that the way we construct threats, both in our minds, but also to other people, is very much dependent on a set of basic semantic structures. And I think I'll stop here and I'll pass it forward to Ken. Ken, I'm very looking forward to listen to your comments and feedback. Thank you. Great stuff. Thanks, Eitan. And thanks also, Amanda, for your introductions earlier. I was just looking at the number of participants and there's 48 people here, which is cracking. I know it's early in the term, but one of the advantages I think of one of the very few advantages of corona is that it's made it easier for people to come to interesting talks that they'd like to join. So great to see everybody here. Also here on the call is my dog who's currently asleep on my knee, but likes to join in when I start talking. So she may appear at some stage if you're wondering what on earth's going on. So Eitan's talk is very interesting, very exciting, exciting new research, which is the context of this seminar series, isn't it? To learn new and exciting things. For those of you that don't know any more than you've heard in the last 20 minutes, Eitan would I think situate himself within the subject, the sub-discipline of political psychology. So if you like that, and that's your first exposure of it, perhaps you're a newbie to the field of political psychology, that's where you wanna be concentrating your reading. And political psychology has a long history in international relations and in political studies more broadly, going right the way back, well, right the way back to Thucydides, but I always think that psychology proper in IR starts with Klaus Fitz, who was a proto-psychologist. And he was interested in some of the things that Eitan's interested in too. He was interested in the role of emotion, for example, in decision-making. And he was interested in how decision-makers categorize things on the basis of imperfect information. And of course, writing about war, he was interested in threat perception. And he brought some of that thinking together under his rubric of the genius commander. But he rather ruefully concluded in a letter to a friend that psychology was a bit of a dark art of which we know very little. And times have changed somewhat since then, but perhaps not as much as we might like. Two later theorists, four bears, if you like, of Eitan's work worth noting Thomas Schelling and Robert Gervis to the doyens of the field. Also interested in perception and threat perception and had a lot of time for discussing personality and emotion in how people judged events in the outside world. And moving away from the idea that the outside world was somehow objectively given. But really the field has come on in, I think, in the last, since I joined the field in the last 20 years, there've been some very rapid changes to what political psychology is about and what political psychologists do in Eitan's at the forefront of that. And partly that reflects some of the big changes that have happened in the field of neuroscience in the last 20 or 30 years, not least on the equipment side of things and the development of functional magnetic resonance imaging to allow you to see with some degree fidelity what's going on inside the mind. And it's really a boom time for research in neuroscience. And what a lot of political psychology today is about is trying to keep pace with the reading in neuroscience and think laterally, well, how do I apply that to the study of international relations? And I guess that's the game that I'm in and I think that's the game that Eitan is in as well. Neuroscientists are interested in some of the same things. They're interested in threat perception directly, of course, but they're interested in some of the other things that Eitan spoke about there, the way in which we generate language and meaning in the brain, the role of metacognition, that is thinking about thinking, the way in which we introspect and construct these models in our mind of what things mean and might be going on in the world and how we as individuals are situated relative to that. And there's a lot of work in neuroscience and psychology today on the concept of embodied consciousness, embodied cognition, the fact that we're living, breathing animals and exist in relationship to a world outside us and that relationship changes the way that we construct our little slice of reality. There's a great paper all the way back from the 50s called, What is it like to be a bat by John Nagel? And he concludes very different from what it's like to be a human, the sense of reality that you're constructing is very different if you hear an echo location from our sense of reality with our sliver of the visual spectrum. There's a connection between neuroscience of course and work that I'm interested in on artificial intelligence that asks again some similar questions here. Can machines without emotions without bodies grasp the world in the same way that we do? And if not, what does that mean for their utility for us when it comes to thinking about strategy, questions of threats and so forth? A couple of other areas that are of interest here and resonated with me when I was listening to Etan's talk, there's been a resurgence in recent years of work on personality and the idea that we're different. Our graphic equalizer of personality varies from person to person. So the way I perceive a threat is qualitatively different from the way that Etan perceives a threat. And of course, when you mentioned personality to anybody, they say, oh, Myers-Briggs. And Myers-Briggs is the astrology of personality studies. So if you're interested in exploring that dimension, stay away from Myers-Briggs and get rather more into the idea of the big five personality test. The big five test measures traits like conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness, neuroticism, which has a direct relevance to this business of threat perception. What's interesting about the big five personality test is that its origins lie in language. Those big five traits were constructed out of clusters of words in the English language that related to each of those five and they semantically mapped them together and said, ah, this looks like a distinct body of adjectives that relates to conscientiousness that are used to describe people's personalities. And that resonated with me when you started talking about language and categorization and the way we group things together. And then the last thing I'll mention here, which didn't come up in any sort, but I'm interested to know if he's interested in it, which is the modern resurgence in genetics, very controversial in social sciences for a variety of reasons. It can sometimes be used very clumsily, bluntly and reductively to make sweeping generalizations that have been harmful. It's got a controversial past. But I think there is going to have to be a reckoning with modern genetic research in social sciences in the course of my career and certainly in the course of some of your careers on the call here, because the findings of modern genetic research are much more robust, cautious, scientifically based than they have been in previous generations. And they do point to some differences in the way we're made up and the way the traits we exhibit when we come to tackle the sorts of strategic problems that we take on. Okay. So those are the things that resonated with me when I was listening to ETAN's presentation and hopefully that situated things in political psychology a little bit for those who may have been new to the subject. It was a really great talk. I'm going to abuse my position by asking a question and perhaps turn it over to Amanda after I've abused that position. It's a rude question. So forgive me, ETAN, how do you do what you're doing? What is your method here? What does it mean to be a political psychologist? Does it mean you spend all day reading interesting articles and then going, oh, well, maybe Boris Johnson, things like that. And what are the problems that political psychologists face in terms of their method? Yeah, brilliant. Thank you, Ken, for the very thoughtful comments and all the things that resonated with you. It's really interesting to see in here and those two find very difficult questions. So first, let me start with commenting maybe we'll discuss some of the things that you've mentioned. So embodied cognition is, I think, a fascinating trajectory. So if we go back to this issue of how we perceive threats then the environment that we're embedded in according to some accounts of embodied cognition should have a very strong impact about how we perceive threats as well. So if I am a leader of a certain state and I am now sitting at the war bunker, right, underground and very deep light and very specific atmosphere, I might be constructing perception in a very different way than to the one that if I would sit in a well-lit office on the 25th floor of a high-rise building, right? So the question is, how does our environment affect or shapes the construction of perception? Give a moment, I think is a fascinating one as well. And just to go back to my own experience and how I started the talk, I spoke about this growing up alongside a terrorist threat in Israel, right? And how it kind of made my mind very narrow to associate all specific group of people with that threat. I didn't experience that threat equally throughout the day, right? It really changed. And I remember very vividly that it was most acutely felt during nighttime. So whenever it would get dark outside in that village and then there's a, this is where really I would start thinking about this issue as a kid really growing up there. And so definitely environment has lots to say here about the way we process these things such as threat perception. So that's about embodied cognition, Ken. And I really like that comment and there's lots to think about. The genetics part, I'm afraid I'm going to pass on that. This is well beyond my turf. I haven't been addressing that so far in my work. I'll be interested to hear more from you on it. But I think it also relates to how do I do what I do, right? And what's the method here? And that's a really interesting question. Whether there is a method here, right? So first of all, I think what I'm trying to do is to learn from senior scholars in the field, right? So people such as Janis Stein and Richard Nedlebaugh who are political psychologists who have gone in these trajectories, in this path well before me, right? And so I'm trying to see what are they recommendations, right? How should we go about doing this kind of research? And there are several challenges here, right? We know that it's not as simple and easy to take insights from say neuroscience or cognitive psychology and simply apply them to international politics. It's not, I wish it would be easy, but it's not. And so there are quite a few things that we must do. I think the first thing to do is after I become familiarized with a certain body of knowledge. So in this case, the theory of constructive emotion and conceptual semantics. The next step is really to try and understand what is the counter arguments? What are the counter arguments in the field of neuroscience? And linguistics vis-a-vis these two bodies of knowledge that I'm interested in, right? It's not enough to simply just copy and paste. I need to understand the bigger, the wider debates in those disciplines. And that's of course a whole different rabbit hole that one has to tackle. And I think this is where I'm at at the moment. So I have a fairly good understanding of these two specific theories and frameworks. And now I'm interested in trying to understand better what are the type of counter arguments being made? And actually embodied cognition is exactly that kind of counter argument being made against this computational understanding of the mind that is very much present in Ray Jackendorf's work. So that's the first thing. The second thing I think in terms of what do we do and as political psychologists, I think there is no substitute for empirical work, right? That's the challenge. So after you've identified certain insight that really kind of resonated with empirical works, then the next point is how to develop a method that would allow other scholars to follow through and actually start and applying these insights or gleaning insight, new insights from international politics as well. And actually the way that I came to this research was exactly that way. So I started from empirical work about Japan's threat deception, lots of archives, lots of documents, really reading what, how leaders describe security threats around Japan and then or simultaneously, reading in these other disciplines and trying to see whether there existed any sort of kind of connection or linkages between these two Turks or territories. So very roughly, Ken, I think this would be kind of my responses to you. Yeah, I hope that's right. That's great. Laurie Friedman in a piece he wrote, reflecting on his career recently, gave the answer that I like most. He said, I'm a scavenger. That's my method. I just read widely and shallowly in as many fields as I possibly can until inspiration strikes. And I thought, yes, that's my method too. I'm a scavenger. So I'm holding on to that. I kind of disagree with you on empirical research. I mean, it has to be done. But for my mind, there's more than enough data in the world. And what's lacking is conceptual work, but that's a personal predilection, I suppose. I think there are some empirical techniques that one can use here. Like those that are interested in personality psychology, for example, do a lot of textual analysis, don't they? And you can generate estimates of people's big five personality traits on the basis of analyzing what adjectives appear in their written work. I was a bit skeptical about that. But I guess the main point is that there's a supposition for political psychologists that people are broadly speaking the same. And if I reacted to a certain situation in a certain way in an experiment, we can't assume that Donald Trump or Joe Biden is an alien who doesn't experience those emotions or zombies, they say in philosophy on the inside, who doesn't have those embodied responses. So if I'm doing empirical research on easy to access subjects in threatening situations, I can be the reasonable degree of credibility. Say, well, maybe a leader would respond in a similar way there. So that's another methodological technique that's sometimes used. There's no way around it, it's hard, right? You know, JFK is not around to sit in a brain scanner while he's doing the Cuban missile crisis at last. So it's an insurmountable problem. Can I ask one more and then turn it over? What, you're interested in East Asian politics. One of the suppositions of, you frozen for a second there, he's still there, he might come back, Ken. Okay, I'll just stay here for a second then. I wonder if he'll leave the room and come back. Maybe. Because of time then, I won't ask him that question when we get him back because it'd be nice to have some questions from there, from the floor, there's already people. Oh, it's just you and me, great Ken. Hopefully he does come back. I think while we're waiting for him to come back, you know, what I found really interesting about the discussion you two were having was, and I'm sure you're familiar with Judith Halberstam and Sarah Ahmed, for example, who are feminist cultural theorists who engage with a lot of neuroscience and neuropsychology to understand affect and the ways in which affect is not necessarily, they speak against the pre-conscious, right? But they speak how this is always imbued in the broader social politics of gender, of race, of class. So, yeah, so they do really interesting mapping, consensual mapping, like you said, around the politics of it, right? So the politics of happiness, the politics of fear, the politics of low themselves, shame, all of that sort of stuff. So Eton, sorry we lost you. So I took that opportunity to blurt out. I'm sure you're familiar with and engaged with cultural feminists like Sarah Ahmed, Judith Halberstam. Oh, she's the author of Cruel Optimism. She just passed away. Anyway, their work is fascinating, I think, because they really do make the link between neuroscience and cultural studies and link the ways in which how we feel our way through the world and affectively respond in the world is still very much gendered, classed, raised, all of these, that comes to matter. So if you haven't really in stuff to engage with, Ken had a quick question. If you wanna ask it really quickly, Ken, and then Ben had a question. So we can collect a few questions and then Eton, that gives you a time to respond to all of them and then we can wrap up, okay? Yeah, okay, I won't actually, but I'm really interested in that comment that you just made there, Amanda, because that's fantastic. And I'm not familiar with their work, but I certainly should be. There is on the political psychology and social sciences more broadly, a tremendous fear, I think, about using neuroscience research to make gendered observations because of the fear that you'll be treading into hot water politically. And I think that's wrong. And I think it's great that some authors are doing so. I won't ask that question because I've used my position too much. So I'm interested to hear from the floor if that's okay. Okay, great. I mean, we can pick up this conversation afterwards too, but before I turn it over to Ben, I'm just going to read Carolina before she left, had to leave the meeting. This is recorded so she can hear your response. She said, you know, brilliant talk. It was great to learn more about your research. And her question is, you mentioned that decision makers should make themselves aware of what influences their threat perceptions, right? So if they're hungry or tired or have had too much coffee or whatnot, how would that work in the everyday form policy making as it's such a fast-paced environment in which people normally don't have the time to reflect and which doesn't allow forsee such reflection as part of their decision making? So hopefully that question makes sense. And before you answer, Ben, I'm going to allow you to ask your question live. I think you can. Wait, do I? Oh, allow to talk. I think I can do that now. Yeah, go ahead, Ben. Hi, it's a fantastic talk. I was super, super interested in what you had to say. And I think the main question I'd have to pose to you is that how do you operationalize your research? Because you're finding very interesting insights within cognitive psychology within neuroscience. But how do you demonstrate all the hypotheses and all the insights from there into the real world where you have a million factors going on, you know? And that's the issue. And that's sort of, if I may, that's an issue that I sort of encountered in my research where I looked at how do leaders interpret losses in foreign policy? So very similar. And I basically drew on psychology, specifically prospect theory and loss aversion and the work done there. And I went down a rabbit hole for about a year or two trying to operationalize the research there and apply it empirically in foreign policy. And at the end of it, I realized that I couldn't, I couldn't basically use the same tools, methodological tools that political psychologists do within my own research, primarily because political scientists, political psychologists, in order to demonstrate congruence between variables, you have to be able to define your variables very, very neatly. And obviously in foreign policy, it's not always simple to do that. What constitutes a loss is very subjective. It's context dependent, right? So perhaps maybe if you look at the discursive conditions which allow certain threats to become threats, that might be a very good entry point for you to actually demonstrate explanatory power of these insights within neuroscience. And I basically just to add, my supervisors were Robert Gervis who I drew a lot of inspiration from psychology from and he has a very fantastic book called How Leaders Think. And that'll be very super interesting for you because he actually details a lot of the work in psychology and neuroscience and how it could be applied. But I think the biggest problem, the stumbling block is really the methodological professionalization of your theory. I don't think, my personal view is that I don't think to do it, you'll be able to deploy the same resources, the same tools that neuroscientists typically do. I think you'd have to do it in a slightly different way which doesn't undermine what you're trying to demonstrate. Right, great, then that's a great question. Let me start with Caroline and then I'll try to address your struggle there and I hear you loud and clear. So in terms of the question by Caroline, Caroline, thank you if you'd watch it in the recording. My answer might come across a bit spiritual or a little bit kind of high there in the sky but I think a minute of mindfulness before leaders go on and make these decisions that impact everybody's lives and really allocate resources and so forth, a minute of mindfulness and perhaps a little bit more than that might be very helpful for all of us. To really stop for a second before you make this momentous decision and ask yourself, how do you feel? What's going on? Well, is there anything that you're now feeling in your body temperature, in the agitation, calmness, displeasure that really might impact and shape the way you react or constructs reality in the world? And I think maybe Ken might be interested in maybe delegating some of these decisions or some of these assessments to things that are not impacted by these kind of things, right? So AI or things that do not really feel or have this pleasure or displeasure or calm or agitated, they might be able to formulate assessments of threats along certain lines of indicators in ways that might have less of that in them. I think there's pretty substantial evidence that our cognitive performance fluctuates during the day, right? Something like 20 or 30% in terms of the way we really approach analytical problems is impacted by the hour of the day. And so if we can perhaps utilize some non-human artificial intelligence to do some of these tasks, then maybe we would be better placed. But this is really for Ken, I think, to be responding to. So mindfulness would be first, my quick answer here. And the second one, just like intelligence agencies have that red teaming and the devils advocate in them, they have that person in there, right? That really, maybe psychologists or somebody that really can point out and highlight the importance of these issues. This would be my response to Caroline's. And then to Ben's question, which is when I really hear where you're coming from, I think the challenge is a methodological challenge. And again here, I think that Ken is a bit more optimistic than I am. But I think that it's not impossible, right? First thing, if you have good documentary data, so say a diary of a leader, if you have video cassettes, such as we have for Richard Nixon, for example, where he really opened up to that tape recorder for a couple of years, if I'm not wrong. You know, this type of documentary evidence that are really private could help us, I think, gain insights about some of these questions, especially if you can then triangulate them and use them, say, with the closest advisors, diaries and reports about that specific leaders. And specifically when I think about threat perception, then this is what we have, right? We have the decision maker herself or himself, right? The evidence that they leave us. We have their closest advisors evaluation of those key central decision makers. But we also have decision-making processes, right? What were these decision makers wanting to do in order to address a certain threat that could be used as source of data, right? And finally, you have also the decision actually taken. So these four sources of data. The first is decision makers themselves, second, their advisors, what did they say about the decision makers' perception of threat. Third is decision-making processes. And then the first one, policy outcomes. I think altogether these four might be helpful when it comes to trying to understand threat perception. You're dealing with loss aversion which is slightly different. But here too, I suggest that you might be able to come up with good satisfactory research designs. It's not gonna be perfect, it's never perfect. No system, no method is perfect in what we do. But I think triangulation is a good way forward. So that would be, I think, my two cents. And then Ken, I'm really interested to hear what you have to say. Unfortunately, there's no time for Ken to weigh in just yet because we only have two minutes left, 18, and you have two questions. I'd like you to spend two minutes. Quick bullet point elevator pitch responding to. So the first one is Chance Nelson who asks, thank you, well, who says thank you for such a wonderful enlightening presentation. Your work seems very centered on the individual political leader. Do your main points change much when raised to the psychology of the masses? And are there any particular points emphasized in mass psychology that you could perhaps draw upon? The second question is by Rachel Power and she asks, as you embark on neurological effects of human threat perception broadly, how has that changed your own perceptions and feelings of threat perception? In application to your coffee shop experience, where do you think your perception of threat might have resulted from, apart from the Arabic voices you've heard? Really great questions. I'm giving you one and a half minutes to respond to them. Brilliant, thank you. Chance, yes, individual versus social psychology. It's a whole different body of literature, right? Some of the things that I've talked about follow the principle of psychological constancy, meaning that we all share them, right? Some of the things I mentioned, for example, I believe that we all experience threat in space. And of course there are individual differences in terms of personality as was mentioned and personal experience and so on. But we do share some kind of mechanism among all of us. And this is kind of the interesting question for me, trying to understand these issues. So some of these things might apply for people in general. But the social psychology aspect is vast and there's a lot more there to cover, peer pressure and so on. So this is for Chase's question. And for Rachel, it's such a brilliant question. That's, I think, something that a lot of scientists and neuroscientists especially are dealing with, right? Once you find out or learn something about how the brain works, then there is the risk of starting to evaluate your own life experiences according to that insight. And so there is definitely that element in my own work. And we also know that memories are quite fallible and they can really change with time and so forth. But what I am trying to do is to try and evaluate my current experiences in addition to past experiences according to this kind of conceptual framework and really trying to see if it makes sense and what can we glean from that? And this is again where I do think that empirical work is important. Trying to apply this concept to data about the world what leaders were saying, how the experience threat I think is one way that I'd like to do that. I think I could really spend more time in answering these two questions, but I'll stop here. Yes, unfortunately we're out of time, but thank you, Aitin and Ken, for your engagement, brilliant discussions. And thank you so much to the audience for your engagement and tuning in. And just please come to next Wednesday's lunchtime seminar series if you're interested.