People’s Reactions to the Nuclear Weapons’ Threat: Mapping Post-Cold-War Research and Evidence

More than three decades have passed since the last major reviews by US psychology researchers of people’s responses to the threat from nuclear weapons. With widespread perceptions that nuclear weapon threats are increasing and may be comparable to levels not seen since the worst periods of the Cold War, there could be value in psychologists documenting and explaining people’s reactions to these threats. As a first step, we map what psychologists and researchers from related fields such as political science have been doing since the end of the Cold War to measure and understand people’s reactions to the nuclear weapon threat. A systematic search in Web of Science and SCOPUS identified 18,505 hits. Screening resulted in 256 suitable articles. We assessed (a) the quantity of published articles over time; (b) the development of the research community, through author collaborations and focal journals; (c) how potentially generalizable and replicable findings were, as indicated by appropriate samples; (d) shared methods and measures. We find renewed interest in the field but not yet a coherent research community, and only some evidence for its evolution from occasional, scattered, one-off studies toward a coherent and coordinated scholarly field.