Soviet-American Dialogue in the Social Sciences Research Workshops on Interdependence Among Nations (1990) / Chapter Skim
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An American View of Soviet Contributions
An American View of Soviet Contributions
Pages 7-21
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From page 7... ...
We have found both: current Soviet work on political leaders' concepts, models of interdependence, strategic stability, crises in Soviet-American relations, awareness of ecological issues, and other topics intersects in challenging ways with American work on related subjects. Although our task is chiefly to review Soviet contributions to the 1988 and 1989 workshops for possible connections with current American work let us begin by classifying the workshop papers from both national groups.
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From page 8... ...
. pOlltICS Tilly, Third World conflict Sergeev and Parshin, Caribbean missile crisis Tetlock, cognitive-rhetorical styles Gamson, framing political issues Nistratov and Velichkovsky, mass consciousness Korobeinikov, shared political values Mitchell, environmental consciousness Sokolov and Abalkina, politics and ecology .
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From page 9... ...
The currently favored approach elucidates concepts that appear in the thinking of political and military leaders, as revealed in speeches, Political writings, and reports in mass media. The primary method is semantic analysis of texts, guided to some degree by concepts borrowed from cognitive science.
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From page 10... ...
This study points up the potential value of a collaborative effort in which American investigators would examine the methodology of a Soviet study closely and replicate its findings, while Soviet investigators conducted similar analyses of texts in which the same terms were used by American political leaders. Some Soviet conceptual analyses are scholarly essays with no specified data bases.
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From page 11... ...
summarize the observational and experimental work that substantiates the proposed principles; (2) formalize the implied relationships in one or more models; (3)
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They consider possible revisions of game theory and conclude that the concept of a Nash equilibrium (Nash, 1951) provides a better starting point than that of a Pareto optimum (von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1953)
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From page 13... ...
The purpose of these studies is to produce a model of the thinking of political leaders; the 1988 paper treats Kennedy; the 1989 paper, Khrushchev. The analysis of the Caribbean crisis is initiated with a novel and instructive variation on the classical approach of game theory.
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From page 14... ...
In this instance, the data are the protocols of a sequence of news reports of notable events during the crisis, beginning with Kennedy's decision to escalate what the Soviet investigators refer to as "subversive activities" against Cuba; continuing with the agreement between the USSR and Cuba about deploying nuclear weapons, the relocation of the American air defense forces to the southeast of the country, the announcement of the quarantine of Cuba by the United States, and so on; and concluding at the 11th and i2th steps with the removal of the U.S. quarantine from Cuba and the joint request of the United States and the USSR to the United Nations to cancel the issue of the Caribbean crisis from the agenda.
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From page 15... ...
By the time of Kennedy's second message to Khrushchev, the United States had shifted to higher anticipated value for cooperation, while the USSR had not changed. At the final step of the analysis, corresponding to a point just after the end of the crisis (the January 7, 1963, joint message of the United States and the USSR to the United Nationsy, the highest probability matrix was the one associated with the familiar game of Chicken, represented by the payoff matrix: Cooperation Conflict Cooperation 3,3 Conflict 4,2 2,4 1,1 Each participant places the highest value on the outcome of a choice of conflict, depending on the other to "weaken" and choose cooperation.
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From page 16... ...
. The cognitive maps constructed for points in time shortly before the crisis show Kennedy believing that the international situation was controllable by resources at the disposal of the United States and the Caribbean not being perceived as comparable to the Middle East in terms of potential danger.
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From page 17... ...
The principal cognitive maps are based on the report of the Communist Party Central Committee to the 22nd Party Congress in October 1961, a year before the crisis, and Khrushchev's report to the Supreme Soviet and Pravda in December 1962, just following the height of the crisis. The cognitive map for Khrushchev constructed prior to the crisis shows a major goal of "curbing imperialism," much emphasis on metaphors expressing the power of the socialist bloc but little evaluation of the power of the United States and NATO, and a striking lack of analysis of possible U.S.
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From page 18... ...
One result taken to indicate that Soviet and American publics increasingly recognize the need for reciprocity came from a poll conducted in Moscow concerning the results of the Gorbachev-Reagan summit: 90 percent of the respondents expressed satisfaction. That finding provides an interesting comparison with an NBC-Washington Post poll in the United States in which 70 percent of the respondents approved of a summit agreement on the elimination of intermediate nuclear forces in Europe.
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From page 19... ...
Recent speeches by Mikhail Gorbachev urge radical environmental reform and the initiation of large-scale projects to protect the environment. The results of this historical study, which needs to be paralleled in other countries, suggest that the aversion to nuclear arms buildup evidenced in public opinion polls may be simply one aspect of a widespread increase in public awareness of and concern about threats to the environment.
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From page 20... ...
In the Institute for Control Problems, they discovered a serious interest in formal choice theory and game theory; however, that interest does not yet seem to have been directed toward the prevention of nuclear conflict. In the area of political science, Soviet investigators at the workshops evinced interest in American research on the evolution of international cooperation and the modeling of cooperation and competition, but they reported no similar research efforts in the Soviet Union.
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From page 21... ...
We are aware of potentially relevant Soviet research on large economic systems and coalitions, and we hope that it will be represented in future workshops. The relatively extensive Soviet contributions in behavioral research included studies of public opinion and attitudes, but they focused more sharply on the mental processes of political and military leaders.
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