People’s Responses to Nuclear Weapons: Mapping Post-Cold War Research

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 responses to nuclear weapons. More than 3 decades have passed since the last major reviews of people’s responses to nuclear weapons. We thus aimed to understand how psychologists and researchers from related fields have empirically studied responses to nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War. We systematically mapped articles reporting on people’s responses. A search in Web of Science and Scopus identified 18,505 hits. Screening resulted in 256 suitable articles. We assessed (a) publication patterns, including how many articles focused on responses to nuclear weapons, when those articles were published, and in which field; (b) the research community, namely author collaborations and focal journals; (c) research themes, as indicated by cocitation networks and theoretical backgrounds; and (d) the validity, generalizability, and replicability of empirical findings, as indicated by adequate samples and validated measures. We found 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.