Nicholas D. Wright is no longer with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Nicholas D. Wright was a nonresident associate at the Carnegie Endowment. His research draws on his background in neuroscience to explore political decisionmaking in economics and nuclear security. He is a member of the Royal College of Physicians (UK).
Prior to joining Carnegie, Wright was a research fellow in the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London and a visiting fellow in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics. Previously, Wright worked in internal medicine and then in clinical neurology in Oxford and London.
Wright has published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychopharmacology, and a variety of other journals. His work has been featured in newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph and the Irish Times, and he has appeared on the BBC World Service and BBC World News. All publications on neuroscience can be found in PDF form here.
Insights from neuroscience can help to improve strategic decisionmaking in crises and to foster a more stable international order.
To understand how humans really make decisions, experts can draw on a biologically grounded account that combines evidence from neuroscience, biology, psychology, and economics.
China and Japan’s perceptions of fairness are often incompatible, leading to a fairness dilemma that could end in tragedy and involve the U.S. military.
Insights into human decision-making can be used to guide public policy.
Wondering whether the historic nuclear talks with Iran will succeed or fail? Study the brain.
Asymmetry in distributions of potential outcomes and whether those potential outcomes reflect gains or losses both exert a powerful influence on value-based choice.
Economic choices are strongly influenced by whether potential outcomes entail gains or losses.
Human choice behavior often reflects a competition between inflexible computationally efficient control on the one hand and a slower more flexible system of control on the other. This distinction is well captured by model-free and model-based reinforcement learning algorithms.
The world today is a very different place than it was barely twelve years ago when the war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates began. Continuing advances in various spheres such as the sociotechnical world will present both challenges and opportunities.
Decision- and policy-makers need a set of revised influence and deterrence tools and approaches that are applicable to the modern security environment.
