This award is funded through the Social and Behavioral Dimensions of National Security, Conflict, and Cooperation competition, a joint venture between NSF and the Department of Defense.
This award is for a workshop on the behavioral foundations of terrorism. The lead workshop organizer plans to bring together researchers from multiple disciplines to share their knowledge and develop future research projects. The organizer will target researchers in three domains: 1) researchers from sociology, psychology and criminology who investigate the particulars of terrorist organizations, including how they recruit and operate, what motivates their members, and how they respond to threats; 2) researchers from economics and political science who model conflict between groups using game theory; and 3) researchers from economics and psychology who use laboratory and field experiments to test predictions of the game-theoretic models.
The workshop organizer plans to incorporate in-depth knowledge from terrorism experts into game-theoretic models and then test these models through laboratory experiments. Participants at the workshop, under the guidance of group leaders, will present their and others' research which illustrates the state-of-the-art in their disciplines. By bringing together this interdisciplinary group, the organizer hopes to generate new programs of research around national security, terrorism, and counter-terrorism activities. Outputs from the workshop will include new, interdisciplinary research projects, which will be disseminated via a special issue of a journal or an edited volume. The primary broader impact of this project is to develop more effective and informed public policies that address issues of terrorism.
