The Michael Shermer Show

The Psychology of War: Could YOU Make a Moral Choice in Wartime?

November 16, 2025

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  • Societies like the US and Britain are unusually stable due to deliberate structures that harness human capacities for restraint and self-reflection, counteracting inherent human tendencies toward violence. 
  • Human behavior, including conflict and cooperation, is driven by an orchestra of brain systems, where fear processing and the ability to interpret others' intentions are crucial for both survival and large-scale social organization. 
  • Societal stability relies on a balance between rule-followers (Icemen) and rule-breakers/risk-takers (Mavericks), as both types are necessary for maintaining order and driving necessary societal progress. 
  • Warfare fundamentally relies on deceit, leveraging humanity's sophisticated machinery for detecting lies, as exemplified by historical code-breaking successes like at the Battle of Midway. 
  • Surprise and novelty (prediction error) are crucial psychological drivers, attracting attention, changing mental models, and being key to effective communication, humor, and even maintaining relationships, as illustrated by Taylor Swift's strategy. 
  • Human consciousness and self-awareness may arise from the brain's capacity to create nested models of its own thinking, though introspection has practical limits (around four or five levels deep), and societal structures necessitate a belief in personal agency and responsibility (free will) for functional governance. 

Segments

Guest Background and Book Introduction
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(00:01:20)
  • Key Takeaway: Dr. Nicholas Wright is a neurologist and neuroscientist advising the Pentagon, whose work focuses on the brain’s role in security and war.
  • Summary: Dr. Nicholas Wright is a neurologist, neuroscientist, and security strategist who advises the Pentagon joint staff. He researches the brain, technology, and security at institutions including UCL and Georgetown University. His new book is titled Warhead: How the Brain Shapes War and War Shapes the Brain.
Path to Neuroscience and War Studies
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(00:03:06)
  • Key Takeaway: Wright transitioned from practicing neurology to researching decision-making using functional brain scanning, eventually applying this knowledge to warfare strategy.
  • Summary: Wright began as a neurology doctor in Oxford and London, researching decision-making regarding risks and rewards using functional brain scanning and computational modeling. He decided to apply his understanding of the brain to warfare, leading him to work in Washington D.C. on nuclear strategy and interact with the Pentagon for over a decade.
Stability of US Political System
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(00:08:52)
  • Key Takeaway: The US political system is unusually stable historically, evidenced by the lack of violent regime change for over 160 years since the Civil War.
  • Summary: The US and Britain are unusual in their long-term political stability compared to many other nations that have experienced multiple regime changes. This stability is not accidental but is reinforced by structures designed by the Founding Fathers who understood human flaws like violence and vanity. The people working within institutions like the Pentagon are often fundamentally decent individuals trying to maintain this stability.
Drivers of Political Violence
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(00:15:21)
  • Key Takeaway: Killing in conflict is difficult, and human beings are fundamentally built to survive conflict, which involves both aggressive drivers and capacities for restraint.
  • Summary: Most people do not engage in political violence, and even in combat, only a minority of soldiers discharge their weapons. Every human brain contains drivers that can push toward violence, stemming from the evolutionary need to survive conflict with other ‘survival machines.’ However, humans also possess capacities for reflection, wisdom, and self-restraint that enable complex, peaceful societies.
Brain Machinery for Cooperation
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(00:17:57)
  • Key Takeaway: Advanced neural machinery for interpreting others’ intentions allows humans to cooperate on a scale unmatched by any other species.
  • Summary: The brain’s machinery for assessing intentions enables cooperation far beyond what is seen in other primates like chimpanzees. This capacity allows humans to form coherent political communities numbering in the hundreds of millions, which is a mind-boggling figure historically. This cooperation is built upon shared models and social norms, often maintained through a ’theory of mind’ mechanism.
Identity, Culture, and Variation
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(00:24:50)
  • Key Takeaway: Large-scale human societies are enabled by spiraling identities and cultures, which are further turbocharged by language allowing for shared mental models.
  • Summary: Societies function through spiraling identities (answering ‘who am I?’) and cultures (rules for ‘how things are done around here’), which language helps to solidify and share. Heterogeneity, including risk-takers and rule-breakers, is a strength, as evidenced by the failure of regimes attempting to enforce rigid conformity, like Hitler’s Germany. Both rule-followers (Icemen) and rule-breakers (Mavericks) are necessary for a functioning society.
Hindsight and Decision Making in War
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(00:31:33)
  • Key Takeaway: The transition of German society to Nazism involved a confluence of post-WWI societal brutality, economic collapse, and a skilled leader exploiting existing hierarchical structures.
  • Summary: The descent into WWII involved a spiral of fear and distrust following WWI, creating a brutalized society ripe for a skilled leader like Hitler to assume dominance or prestige-based authority. Leaders can steer societies in vastly different directions, as seen with Hitler versus Gorbachev, and hindsight makes judging past decisions difficult. The core challenge in international politics is the uncertainty regarding an adversary’s true intentions.
Affordances and Rule Following
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(00:40:53)
  • Key Takeaway: Humans navigate the world by limiting actions to a small set of perceived options, or ‘affordances,’ to avoid anarchy, even when theoretically capable of infinite random actions.
  • Summary: The vast number of physically possible actions at any moment is constrained by ‘affordances’—what the environment allows us to do—forcing us to operate within narrow rules to prevent anarchy. This constraint explains why soldiers obey officers and why populations often do not revolt, as breaking established norms is rarely perceived as a plausible option (the ‘belling the cat’ problem). Conversely, historical heroes like René Carmill succeeded by lying to the SS, demonstrating that breaking rules can sometimes serve a greater good.
Brain Models and Prediction Error
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(00:52:55)
  • Key Takeaway: The brain operates via models that link sensory input to actions, and learning occurs when these models generate incorrect predictions, resulting in a ‘prediction error’ signal.
  • Summary: A model is an if-then process describing how senses link to actions to achieve goals, with sophisticated brains simulating entire worlds, including literal spatial maps confirmed by Nobel Prize-winning research. These models constantly make predictions about reality, and when these predictions fail, the resulting ‘prediction error’ serves as the learning signal to update and improve the model.
Warfare and Deception
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(01:04:48)
  • Key Takeaway: Warfare is fundamentally built on deceit, requiring sophisticated human machinery to detect lies.
  • Summary: Britain and France went to war over Poland in 1939, despite initial failures. Warfare heavily relies on deceit, echoing Churchill’s quote about truth needing a bodyguard of lies. Humans possess highly sophisticated machinery for discerning deception, as lying is a fundamental human activity, even in games like tennis.
Prediction Error and Surprise
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(01:05:03)
  • Key Takeaway: Successful military strategy, like at the Battle of Midway, hinges on accurate prediction models derived from code-breaking, exploiting enemy prediction errors.
  • Summary: The Battle of Midway involved successful code-breaking, allowing Admiral Nimitz to predict Japanese movements and attack locations. In intelligence operations, like cracking the Enigma code, revealing that the code is broken must be masked, sometimes by staging an observable event like an airplane sighting. Surprise and novelty are powerful psychological attractors that change mental models and drive engagement, whether in social media or humor.
Self, Consciousness, and Models
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(01:13:05)
  • Key Takeaway: Consciousness may correlate with the depth of nested mental models, but introspection is limited to about four or five levels of thinking about thinking.
  • Summary: The brain operates with models of the physical world, the body, and then models overseeing those models, which may relate to self-awareness. Clinically, consciousness exists on a measurable spectrum, ranging from minimal awareness to full orientation in time, place, and person, observable during recovery from head injuries. Humans can generally only manage about four or five recursive levels of introspection (thinking about thinking about thinking) before reaching a limit.
The Self as Orchestra
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(01:17:35)
  • Key Takeaway: The self is the product of the entire brain system (the orchestra), not just the highest-level introspective model (the conductor).
  • Summary: The self is not solely the top-level model observing others; rather, it is the entire system, analogous to a concert orchestra with many specialized parts. The capacity for self-reflection acts like a conductor, managing the system, but lower-level functions, like hiccups, remain outside full introspection. The drive to find ultimate purpose stems from using this introspection machinery to seek the top of the brain’s hierarchy.
Volition and Determinism
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(01:20:10)
  • Key Takeaway: Volition is possible because the future is not 100% predictable, allowing learning and adjustment based on past prediction errors.
  • Summary: Philosophical determinism fails because the universe is not a read-only memory tape; the future is always slightly different from the past. Volition involves learning from past actions (prediction errors) and tweaking variables going forward, which is a form of agency. Society requires a functional belief in personal responsibility, as demonstrated by tribal punishments for cowardice, even if individuals are heavily influenced by social context.
Nuclear Weapons and Optimism
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(01:24:47)
  • Key Takeaway: Despite the security dilemma, the non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945 and limited proliferation suggest a positive, albeit precarious, historical trend.
  • Summary: The value of nuclear weapons is based on collective agreement, yet their destructive power is real, meaning determinists do not ignore them in practice. Proliferation has been far less extensive than predicted in the 1960s, suggesting successful safeguards and deterrence mechanisms are in place. While immediate disarmament of major powers like Russia seems implausible, the long period without use indicates reasons for optimism regarding global stability.