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War and Human Nature Summary:By Stephen Peter Rosen
Why did President John F. Kennedy choose a strategy of confrontation during the Cuban missile crisis even though his secretary of defense stated that the presence of missiles in Cuba made no difference? Why did large numbers of Iraqi troops surrender during the Gulf War even though they had been ordered to fight and were capable of doing so? Why did Hitler declare war on the United States knowing full well the power of that country? War and Human Nature argues that new findings about the way humans are shaped by their inherited biology may help provide answers to such questions. This seminal work by former Defense Department official Stephen Peter Rosen contends that human evolutionary history has affected the way we process the information we use to make decisions. The result is that human choices and calculations may be very different from those predicted by standard models of rational behavior. This notion is particularly true in the area of war and peace, Rosen contends. Human emotional arousal affects how people learn the lessons of history. For example, stress and distress influence people's views of the future, and testosterone levels play a role in human social conflict. This thought-provoking and timely work explores the mind that has emerged from the biological sciences over the last generation. In doing so, it helps shed new light on many persistent puzzles in the study of war. Contents Acknowledgments vii Chapter One Introduction 1 Chapter Two Emotions, Memory, and Decision Making 27 Chapter Three Status, Testosterone, and Dominance 71 Chapter Four Stress, Distress, and War Termination 99 Chapter Five Of Time, Testosterone, and Tyrants 135 Chapter Six Where Do We Go from Here? 179 Notes 185 Index 205 Acknowledgments This book tries to show how work done in the neurosciences over the last twenty-five years can help us better understand how people make decisions, and, in particular, how they make decisions about war and peace. I hope this is the beginning, not the end, of the serious discussion of the biological dimensions of human international political behavior. This is not a biological determinist argument. At each stage in the book, I try to show how the biological aspects of human decision making interact with the social and historical dimensions of human politics. Nor is it an attack on rational choice theory, though it does try to show how the neurosciences can help us better specify how people make calculations, and indicate when and how people will not behave in the ways predicted by economic theory. Because it is still early days as far as understanding the full complexity of the human mind, I make an effort to show the limits of my arguments, while trying to set out what I believe to be well-founded arguments based on the limited parts of human cognition that we do understand. The manuscript has been reviewed by neuroscientists and anthropologists working on the biology of violence, as well as political scientists. No errors in my presentation of work in the neurosciences were found. That does not mean that the reviewers agreed with my conclusions about human politics. Because this has been and will be a contentious project, I am particularly grateful to the people who have helped me over the last six years. Andrew Marshall was, in this project, as in my intellectual life in general, essential. The help of Bob Jervis with this book was appreciated more than usual because I was working in a field in which he is a master. Allan Stam, Jon Mercer, John Mearsheimer, and Dick Betts all gave me a chance to present my work in its early stages, and to argue its merits, even though they had major disagreements with it. For this I am and will remain grateful. Please select one mirror to download
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