Mathematical Models, Rational Choice, and the Search for Cold War Culture

Author(s): By Paul Erickson

Source: Isis, Vol. 101, No. 2 (June 2010), pp. 386-392
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
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Mathematical Models, Rational

Choice, and the Search for Cold
War Culture
By Paul Erickson*

ABSTRACT

A key feature of the social, behavioral, and biological sciences after World War II has
been the widespread adoption of new mathematical techniques drawn from cybernetics,
information theory, and theories of rational choice. Historians of science have typically
sought to explain this adoption either by reference to military patronage, or to a characteristic Cold War culture or discursive framework strongly shaped by the concerns of
national security. This essay explores several episodes in the history of game theorya
mathematical theory of rational choicethat demonstrate the limits of such explanations.
Military funding was indeed critical to game theorys early development in the 1940s.
However, the theorys subsequent spread across disciplines ranging from political science
to evolutionary biology was the result of a diverse collection of debates about the nature
of rationality and choice that marked the Cold War era. These debates are not easily
reduced to the national security imperatives that have been the focus of much historiography to date.

NE OF THE MOST STRIKING FEATURES of the postwar social, behavioral, and

biological sciences has been their widespread adoption of theoretical frameworks
based on models of rational choice. Economists explain the organization of markets and
industries using game theory, a mathematical theory of interactions between rational
individuals; evolutionary biologists model selfish genes as rational actors; and political
theorists explore the functioning of democracy using the mathematics of preferences and
social choice. These theories have yielded deep insights into the nature of social interaction, and in the case of economics, several Nobel Prizes. At the same time, their
ascendancy has crowded out alternative methodologies and perspectives on the study of
behavior and society. Mathematical formalisms have displaced knowledge that is histor-

* Department of History, Wesleyan University, Public Affairs Center 113, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459.
The author would like to thank Hunter Heyck, David Kaiser, Bernard Lightman, and Amrys Williams for their
very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
Isis, 2010, 101:386 392
2010 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
0021-1753/2010/1012-0007$10.00
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387

ical and contingent; and concepts of ethics, fairness, justice, and tradition have been
reinterpreted in terms of a thin vision of rationality encapsulated in axioms of preference
ordering or utility maximization. The ascendancy of theories of rational choice in the late
twentieth century has thus stimulated and reinforced a profound shift in the nature of
social knowledge.1
The longstanding challengeto historians of science as well as to dissident practitioners in many social and behavioral sciences has been how to explain this development
in terms of the history of the postWorld War II era. Was the rise of mathematical theories
of rational choice during this period inevitable and permanent, or was this phenomenon
the result of historical forces that may shift in the future? To date, a number of writers
have attributed the startling success of rational choice models over the past sixty years to
the rise in state especially militarypatronage for science as a result of the Cold War.
Such an approach follows a long tradition of scholarship in the history of science
documenting the changes in experimental and observational practices that large research
budgets enabled in the physical sciences. In the realm of theory, where metaphors and
models can circulate more independently of money than particle accelerators or earth
observing satellites, historians have also suggested that scientists without direct connections to state funding may have nevertheless conformed to an overarching hegemonic
discourse or dominant modeling idiom promoted by powerful state patrons of science.
This is especially true in literature exploring the prevalence of mathematical models of
information, systems, and computing in fields like psychology, ecology, and biology.2
This historiographic emphasis on unearthing a coherent Cold War discourse or culture,
flowing from the Cold Wars most iconic institutions like the state and the military, clearly
possesses great intuitive appeal. And clearly, military funding and objectives played a role
in creating and disseminating theories of rational choice. Some techniques like statistical
decision theory and mathematical programming (as well as the somewhat better known
techniques of information theory and cybernetics) emerged during World War II from
practical problems studied by mathematicians of the Office of Scientific Research and
Developments Applied Mathematics Panel, and the operations research units attached to

1 On the history of modern theories of rational choice see especially the review essay by Jamie Cohen-Cole,
Cybernetics and the Machinery of Rationality, British Journal for the History of Science, 2008, 41:109 114;
Philip Mirowksi, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press,
2002); and S.M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice
Liberalism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003). For critical assessments of rational choice models in the
social sciences see especially G. M. Hodgson, How Economics Forgot History: the Problem of Historical
Specificity in Social Science (New York: Routledge, 2001); Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of
Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994);
and Jeffrey Friedman, ed., The Rational Choice Controversy: Economic Models of Politics Reconsidered (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1996).
2 See, for example, Paul Forman, Behind quantum electronics: National security as basis for physical research
in the United States, 1940-1960, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 1987, 18:149 229.
See also Stuart Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT
and Stanford (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993); Michael Aaron Dennis, Our First Line of Defense: Two
University Laboratories in the Postwar American State, Isis, 1994, 85:427 455; and Peter Galison, Image and
Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997). On the prevalence of
mathematical modeling in biological fields and psychology see, for example, P.G. Abir-Am, The Molecular
Transformation of 20th Century Biology, in Science in the Twentieth Century, ed. John Krige and Dominique
Pestre (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997); Lily Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code
(Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2000); Peter J. Taylor, Technocratic Optimism, H. T. Odum, and the Partial
Transformation of Ecological Metaphor after World War II, Journal of the History of Biology, 1988, 21:213
244; and Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).

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various military services. Otherssuch as game theory did not originate in the wartime
context, but were promoted afterwards by defense-related funding agencies. These theories of decision making thus appear to have been tailored to military applications from the
moment of their creation, and their spread through economics and other fields can be read
as a response to the practical demands of the national security state.3 But while a focus on
the influence of Cold War national security imperatives can explain the origins of some
prominent mathematical techniques for analyzing rational choice, they do not explain
these techniques subsequent appropriation, often long after the development of the
mathematics in question, in such diverse areas as political theory, economics, and even
evolutionary biology. They also fail to account for the exceptional persistence of rational
choice approaches in these fields, often in the absence of any detectable military influence.
Explaining such phenomena requires thinking about science in the period so often
called the Cold War in a way that spotlights the diversity of Cold War culture rather
than the pervasive influence of the military-industrial-academic complex. If anything, the
widespread adoption of theories of rational choice during this period speaks less to the
power of funding to direct research or the strength of some hegemonic discourse, and
more to the interpretive plasticity of the mathematics of choice and rationality. Game
theory, utility theory, and social choice theory provided mathematical tools that could be
reworked to engage with any number of debates over the nature of rationality and
choice that often unfolded independently of state funding, but that nevertheless were
characteristic of American intellectual culture during this period. Many social and behavioral scientists of the 1950s and 1960s worried that traditional decision-making procedures
in government and industry simply could not cope with the demands of a society
increasingly dependent on complex technologies for its economic development as well as
for its defense. As a result, techniques that had initially been developed to maximize the
combat effectiveness of new guns and aircraftmost notably, systems analysis and
operations research as practiced at the RAND Corporation and elsewherewere readily
adapted in the 1960s to help manage the provisioning of health care, education, and urban
services, all of which were seeking to better manage the introduction of new technologies.
Private foundations and academics outside of government were also concerned with the
implications of high modernity especially the increased complexity of problems requiring public engagementfor the future of American social and political institutions. It was
thought that the new mathematical tools used for analyzing and optimizing the performance of these decision-making organizations, and for studying the formation of public
opinion and action, might help address some of these problems.4 However, in the 1960s,

3 On the role of wartime and postwar patronage for operations research and related mathematical theories see
William Thomas, The Heuristics of War: Scientific Method and the Founders of Operations Research, British
Journal for the History of Science, 2007, 40:251274; Martin J. Collins, Cold War Laboratory: RAND, the Air
Force, and the American State, 19451950 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002); Larry
Owens, Mathematicians at War: Warren Weaver and the Applied Mathematics Panel, 19421945, in History
of Modern Mathematics, ed. David Rowe and John McCleary, 3 vols. (Boston: Academic Press, 1989), Vol. 2,
pp. 287305; Peter Galison, The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision, Critical
Inquiry, 1994, 21:228 266; and Mirowski, Machine Dreams (cit. n. 1).
4 The adaptation of wartime techniques to postwar industry is traced most clearly in Stephen B. Johnson,
Three Approaches to Big Technology: Operations Research, Systems Engineering, and Project Management,
Technology and Culture, 1997, 38:891919. Much literature treats this in the context of the history of the RAND
Corporation: see, for example, Martin J. Collins, Cold War Laboratory: RAND, the Air Force, and the American
State, 19451950 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002). On how techniques from operations
research and systems analysis made the leap from warfare to welfare see especially David R. Jardini, Out of
the Blue Yonder: The RAND Corporations Diversification into Social Welfare Research, 1946-1968 (Ph.D.

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389

the notion that one could engineer rationality in any aspect of lifefrom defense policy
to urban planning came under attack from both the left and the right of the American
political spectrum. Campus activists and antiwar intellectuals argued that the supposed
rationality of military experts was dangerously myopic, leading in aggregate to astoundingly irrational resultsan arms race without end, and the violence of the Vietnam War.5
Simultaneously, longtime defenders of free markets and critics of government intervention
in the domestic economy, such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, helped articulate
a new language for political economy that valorized choice and individual liberty.
These broader currents of intellectual and political culture proved critical to the
spread of mathematical theories of rational choice during the Cold War era, and their
influence was often felt in surprising ways. Here, I want to focus on one particularly
striking example of this influence in the appropriation and use of a theory of rational
choice game theory by a community of social and behavioral scientists centered at
the University of Michigan in the 1950s and 1960s. These individuals came together
around a program of research associated with the names peace research and
conflict resolution. Despite its initial association with defense funding agencies
after World War II, game theory would rapidly emerge as a central feature of conflict
resolution. At the same time, conflict resolution would reorient the study of game
theory, drawing attention to new kinds of problems and questions while simultaneously opening interdisciplinary channels for its further application in fields as
diverse as political science and evolutionary biology.
The impulses behind conflict resolution were at once academic and activist. Many
of the founders of Michigans Journal of Conflict Resolution and its institutional base,
the Center for Research on Conflict Resolution, were drawn to the field by their
longstanding personal commitments to peace. Kenneth Boulding, a Quaker and
pacifist as well as a prolific economist, had long published both antiwar literature and
academic research on the economics of defense and disarmament, seeking to document the economic costs and benefits of transitioning to a world without war.
Similarly, the mathematical psychologist Anatol Rapoport had been a socialist since
the late 1920s, and had been concerned with antiwar and disarmament causes since his
time as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago before the war. By the
later-1950s Boulding, Rapoport, and many of their colleagues came together to offer

diss., Carnegie-Mellon Univ., 1996); and Jennifer S. Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and
Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2003). The argument that the new
mathematical tools could address problems of social and political institutions owes much to William Graebners
The Engineering of Consent: Democracy and Authority in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: Univ. of
Wisconsin Press, 1987); see also Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy (cit. n. 1), Ch. 1; Sarah E. Igo,
The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.
Press, 2007); and Hunter Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005).
5 On public concerns with the rationality of civil defense planning in the 1950s see especially Sharon
Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard Univ. Press, 2005); and Andrew D. Grossman, Neither Dead Nor Red: Civil Defense and American
Political Development During the Early Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2001). The critique of rationality
often associated with Herbert Marcuses popular One-Dimensional Man (1964)is a common theme of cultural
histories of the 1960s. See, for example, David Steigerwald, The Sixties and the End of Modern America (New
York: St. Martins Press, 1995); Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam
Books, 1987); Jerome Ravetz, Orthodoxies, Critiques, and Alternatives, in Companion to the History of
Modern Science, ed. R. C. Olby et al. (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Theodore Roszak, The Making of a
Counter-Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, N.Y.:
Anchor Books, 1969).

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an alternative agenda for science that would serve as a counterweight to the dominant
orientation of Cold War research. The intellectual foundations for this new science
would not only be found in diplomatic history or practical experience with military
affairs. Instead, they argued that real insights for solving the problem of war would
come from rigorous quantitative or theoretical explorations of the biological, psychological, and social determinants of human behavior of human tendencies toward
violence, conflict, and cooperation.6
In the late 1950s, game theory rapidly emerged as a central tool in conflict resolutions
study of human conflict and cooperation. Ironically, but not surprisingly, its entrance into
conflict resolution was facilitated in part by financial support from military agencies for
scholars associated with the Center for Research on Conflict Resolution. Thomas Schelling, an economist at Yale University who later served on the editorial board of the Journal
of Conflict Resolution, contributed the essay, Bargaining, Communication, and Limited
War to the first issue of the journal in 1957. By that spring, Schelling caught the attention
of the RAND Corporation which then invited Schelling to visit for the summer. There,
during the summer of 1957 and 1958-9, he pioneered the application of non-zero-sum
game theory to the question of how combatants might choose to limit war to certain
classes of weapons or certain battlefields. Studies of the factors limiting conflict subsequently became a staple of conflict resolution research.7
Anatol Rapoport, in spite of his antiwar views and socialist connections, received a
large U.S. Air Force grant in 1956 to develop models of flight crew performance under
stressful conditions. It was the experiments performed for this grant that inspired much of
his research in conflict resolution in the 1950s and 1960s. In searching for an indicator of
the capacity for teamwork among stressed flight crew members, Rapoport chose to
measure the tendency of the team to cooperate while playing the so-called Prisoners
Dilemma (PD) game. In Rapoports multiplayer version of this game, players must
cooperate to achieve the best outcome for the team as a whole, while there are also
incentives for individuals to act uncooperatively. Rapoport ultimately saw his PD-playing
flight crews as a model for the Cold War arms race then unfolding between the United
States and the Soviet Union, with each side tempted to pursue its own security goals
through nuclear weapons production (non-cooperation), to the detriment of both. The
challenge for conflict resolution, as Rapoport argued in a series of widely read books and
articles, was to uncover a new and enlightened logic of decision grounded in human
empathy and conscience rather than the strategic logic of combatthat would guide
political leaders to cooperate when faced with a PD situation. Not surprisingly, Rapoports
call for an empathic rationality gained him a significant audience among the campus New
Left, and he remained a popular speaker at, and organizer of, antiwar events throughout
the 1960s.8

6 The initial proposal for a science of peace came from psychologist Theodore F. Lentz in his Towards a
Science of Peace: Turning Point in Human Destiny (London: Halcyon Press, 1955). On the history of conflict
resolution see especially Katrin Khl, Denkstilwandel im Kalten Krieg: Nachdenken uber Krieg und Frieden
und die Entstehung von Friedens- und Konfliktforschung in den amerikanischen un westdeutschen Socialwissenschaften (Ph.D. diss., Universitat Tubingen, 2003); Anatol Rapoport, Certainties and Doubts: A Philosophy
of Life (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2000); and Cynthia Kerman, Creative Tension: The Life and Thought of
Kenneth Boulding (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1974).
7 Thomas Schelling, Bargaining, Communication, and Limited War, Conflict Resolution, 1957, 1:19 36;
Schelling, Nuclear Weapons and Limited War, RAND Corporation Publication P-1620, 20 Feb 1959; and
Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960).
8 The rise of PD from a simple tale of cops and criminals to a metaphor for the Cold War itself is related in

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Military funding facilitated Schelling and Rapoports work with game theory but
it did not determine the uses to which that game theory would be put. Moreover, game
theorys connection with conflict resolution would reorient the theory in ways unforeseen by the military agencies that were its primary supporters before the late
1950s. Prior to this time, the small community of mathematicians and economists
working for the RAND Corporation and the Office of Naval Research focused most of
their attention on a relatively small part of game theory: the theory of the two-person
zero-sum game. There were a number of technical reasons for this focus, but it also
reflected specific military needs because developing the mathematics of these games
helped solve a number of optimization problems encountered in military logistics and
operations research. Among these mathematicians and economists, game theory became a theory of mathematical optimization. By contrast, working in the context of
conflict resolution with questions about human conflict and cooperation, Schelling and
Rapoport concentrated on exploring the myriad conceptual paradoxes associated with
non-zero-sum game situations. In the process, they found that optimization principles
alone were of limited use in exploring gamessuch as Rapoports PDthat captured
the volatile mix of conflicting and cooperative behaviors at play in limited wars or
arms races.
Conflict resolutions reorientation of game theory would ultimately prove significant in understanding the theorys subsequent trajectory through the sciences. By
connecting game theory with a set of timely discussions about the paradoxes of
conflict and cooperation in the nuclear age, Schelling and Rapoport brought this
formerly obscure mathematical specialty to a broad audience in works such as
Schellings The Strategy of Conflict (1960), Rapoports Fights, Games, and Debates
(1960), and Rapoports Strategy and Conscience (1964). Their ideas also gained
currency through the network of peace research and conflict resolution programs that
sprang up at universities worldwide during the 1960s. In this way, conflict resolution
effectively provided a conduit that facilitated the spread of non-zero-sum game theory
into fields like evolutionary biology during the later 1960s, where it would be
developed and refined in the work of William D. Hamilton, George R. Price, and John
Maynard Smith. None of these researchers work would attract military funding.
Instead, all three would encounter game theory principally (although not exclusively)
in the context of debates over the evolutionary origins of aggressive and altruistic
behaviors. In 1962, Hamilton and Prices advisor at University College London,
Cedric A. B. Smith, organized a peace research group at the Galton Laboratory,
modeled along the lines of Michigans Center for Research on Conflict Resolution,
with the goal of studying the biological basis of altruism, conflict, and cooperation.
While the precise causal links between Cedric Smiths involvement in conflict resolution and the work of his advisees are still not fully understood, it is clear that the
problems that were the focus of the Galton peace research group would be a constant
theme in Hamiltons early work on the evolution of altruism, and later in the 1960s,
in Prices work on the evolution of fighting behaviors and restrained aggression (the
animal equivalent of limited war). The latter would culminate in Price and Maynard
Smiths famous 1973 paper that formulated the concept of an evolutionarily stable
strategy and is often credited with inaugurating evolutionary game theory. Also in
Rapoport, Prisoners DilemmaRecollections and Observations, in Game Theory as a Theory of Conflict
Resolution, ed. Anatol Rapoport (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974); and Rapoport, Certainties and Doubts (cit. n. 6).

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the late 1960s, Hamilton was directly inspired by Rapoports analysis of the PD game
to formulate some of the earliest game-theoretical formulations of the problem of
reciprocal altruism. He would further develop models of reciprocal altruism based on
repeated PD games in collaboration with the political scientist Robert Axelrod,
resulting in Axelrods landmark 1984 book, The Evolution of Cooperation.9
The tangled histories of game theory, conflict resolution, and evolutionary theory in the
1970s hint at several new possibilities for historicizing the spread of rational choice
theories in the postwar era. First and foremost, they reveal the exceptional diversity of
activities and agendas that came to be subsumed beneath the umbrella of rational choice.
For instance, RAND Corporation mathematicians, antiwar conflict resolution gurus like
Anatol Rapoport, and evolutionary biologists like John Maynard Smith called what they
did game theory, but that meant doing very different things in pursuit of wildly diverse
ends. Game theorylike theories of rational choice more generallythus might best be
characterized as a kind of mathematical currency during this period, flowing along lines
of cultural contact and facilitating exchange, producing flashes of understanding between
communities whose comprehension of each others intellectual worlds was otherwise
significantly limited.10 This analogy, while not exact, does have several implications that
concisely sum up my argument. Economic historians have long known that the introduction of a currency can fundamentally change the way societies value and interpret the
world around them. And certainly, as suggested earlier, the widespread adoption of
rational choice approaches has gone hand in hand with a significant shift in how we study
and interpret both individual behavior and social phenomena. However, the existence of
a currency does not imply the existence of a central monetary authority. Analogously, the
broad circulation of rational choice mathematics need not imply the presence of military
patrons, nor does it require the existence of some unified discursive or epistemic framework, stamped by the logic or interests of national security, to undergird scientific
theorizing in this period. Taking Cold War culture seriously as a guiding influence in the
history of science means searching for its diversity as well as its unity.
9 Cedric Smith lays out the goals for his peace research group in a letter to Peace Research Group, 13
August 1962, Lionel Penrose Papers (University College London, Special Collections), Box 41, Folder 8. The
founding publications of evolutionary game theory include John Maynard Smith and G. R. Price, The Logic of
Animal Conflict, Nature, 1973, 246:1518; W. D. Hamilton, Selection of Selfish and Altruistic Behavior in
some Extreme Models, in Man and Beast: Comparative Social Behavior, ed. J. F. Eisenberg and Wilton S.
Dillon (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971), pp. 59 91; and Robert Axelrod and William
Hamilton, The Evolution of Cooperation, Science, 1981, 211:1390 1396.
10 The notion of rational choice mathematics as a currency draws inspiration from the concept of boundary
objects, and from Peter Galisons provocative metaphor of a trading zone developed in Image And Logic: A
Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997). However, in speaking of a
mathematical currency my emphasis is less on the coordination of scientific development across disciplinary and
sub-disciplinary boundaries, and more on the processes governing the transmission and circulation of mathematical techniques and concepts. In this regard, the concept owes much to work in the history of theoretical
physics exploring the circulation of theoretical tools; see for example, David Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart:
The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005); and Andrew
Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 2003).

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