Politics and the Equilibrium of Fear: Can Strategies and Emotions interact

for helpful advice. Researchers from many scientific disciplines seek improved explanations of social behaviors. The results of such explorations are not only new concepts but also refined understandings of the conditions under which more established concepts apply. Political scientists engage in many such explorations. One set of these endeavors is called “Political Psychology.” Another falls under the rubric of game theory. Political psychologists turn to research on human thought and perception from other disciplines to inform and motivate their work. An interesting attribute of political psychology is that there are no widely accepted guidelines for what it means to engage in the practice. Some political psychologists follow standard social psychological practices, designing research from a laboratory-based stimulus-response paradigm and running experiments whose relation to specific scientific questions are simple and clear. Others follow practices common to the study of public opinion and voting behavior in political science. They draw inferences from regressions conducted upon answers to multi-purpose questions placed on large surveys. Still others combine the two paradigms, designing survey experiments that integrate the control and rando