Richard Pipes Team B What was Team B? Team B, composed of civilian experts and retired military officers What was Team B for? as an antagonist force to a group of CIA intelligence officials known as Team A. What was the goal of Team A? I don't know. What did Team B do? Team B was appointed to look at the evidence and to see if we could conclude that the actual Soviet strategy is different from ours, Did they convince people that the Soviet strategy was different? Pipes maintained that Team B contributed to creating more realistic defense estimates. What else did Pipes do in this time? Pipes's group insisted that the Soviet Union, as of 1976, maintained "a large and expanding Gross National Product," What was the result of this claim? One CIA employee called Team B "a kangaroo court". How else was Team B viewed? Pipes called Team B's evidence "soft." What else was noteworthy about Team B? the Soviets had developed several new weapons, featuring a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a system that did not depend on active sonar,
What did they do with these weapons?
What did the Soviets do with the nuclear-armed submarine fleet?
Pipes was head of the 1976 Team B, composed of civilian experts and retired military officers and agreed to by then-CIA director George H. W. Bush at the urging of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) as a competitive analysis exercise. Team B was created at the instigation of then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as an antagonist force to a group of CIA intelligence officials known as Team A. His hope was that it would produce a much more aggressive assessment of Soviet Union military capabilities. Unsurprisingly, it argued that the National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet Union, generated yearly by the CIA, underestimated both Soviet military strategy and ambition and misinterpreted Soviet strategic intentions.  Team B faced criticism. The international relations journalist Fred Kaplan writes that Team B "turns out to have been wrong on nearly every point." Pipes's group insisted that the Soviet Union, as of 1976, maintained "a large and expanding Gross National Product," and argued that the CIA belief that economic chaos hindered the USSR's defenses was a ruse on the part of the USSR. One CIA employee called Team B "a kangaroo court".  Pipes called Team B's evidence "soft." Team B came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several new weapons, featuring a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a system that did not depend on active sonar, and was thus undetectable by existing technology.  According to Pipes, "Team B was appointed to look at the evidence and to see if we could conclude that the actual Soviet strategy is different from ours, i.e. the strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). It has now been demonstrated totally that it was". In 1986, Pipes maintained that Team B contributed to creating more realistic defense estimates. CANNOTANSWER
CANNOTANSWER
Richard Edgar Pipes (; July 11, 1923 – May 17, 2018) was an American academic who specialized in Russian and Soviet history. He published several books critical of communist regimes throughout his career. In 1976, he headed Team B, a team of analysts organized by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who analyzed the strategic capacities and goals of the Soviet military and political leadership. Pipes was the father of American historian Daniel Pipes.

Pipes was born to a Jewish family in Cieszyn, Poland, which fled the country as refugees after it was invaded by Nazi Germany. Settling in the United States in 1940, he became a naturalized citizen in 1943 while serving in the United States Army Air Corps.
From 1958 to 1996, Pipes worked at Harvard University.

Early life
Richard Pipes was born in Cieszyn, Poland to an assimilated Jewish family (whose name had originally been spelled "Piepes"). His father Marek was a businessman and a Polish legionnaire. By Pipes's own account, during his childhood and youth, he never thought about the Soviet Union; the major cultural influences on him were Polish and German.  When he was age 16, Pipes laid eyes upon Adolf Hitler at Marszałkowska Street in Warsaw when Hitler made a victory tour after the Invasion of Poland.  The Pipes family fled occupied Poland in October 1939 and arrived in the United States in July 1940, after seven months passing through Italy.  Pipes became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1943 while serving in the United States Army Air Corps. He was educated at Muskingum College, Cornell University, and Harvard University.

Career
Pipes taught at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1996. He was the director of Harvard's Russian Research Center from 1968 to 1973 and later Baird Professor Emeritus of History at Harvard University. In 1962 he delivered a series of lectures on Russian intellectual history at Leningrad State University. He acted as senior consultant at the Stanford Research Institute from 1973 to 1978. During the 1970s, he was an advisor to Washington Senator Henry M. Jackson. In 1981 and 1982 he served as a member of the National Security Council, holding the post of Director of East European and Soviet Affairs under President Ronald Reagan. He also became head of the Nationalities Working Group.  Pipes was a member of the Committee on the Present Danger from 1977 until 1992 and belonged to the Council of Foreign Relations. He also attended two Bilderberg Meetings, at both of which he lectured. In the 1970s, Pipes was a leading critic of détente, which he described as "inspired by intellectual indolence and based on ignorance of one's antagonist and therefore inherently inept".

Team B

Pipes was head of the 1976 Team B, composed of civilian experts and retired military officers and agreed to by then-CIA director George H.W. Bush at the urging of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) as a competitive analysis exercise. Team B was created at the instigation of then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as an antagonist force to a group of CIA intelligence officials known as Team A. His hope was that it would produce a much more aggressive assessment of Soviet Union military capabilities. Unsurprisingly, it argued that the National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet Union, generated yearly by the CIA, underestimated both Soviet military strategy and ambition and misinterpreted Soviet strategic intentions.

Team B faced criticism. The international relations journalist Fred Kaplan writes that Team B "turns out to have been wrong on nearly every point." Pipes's group insisted that the Soviet Union, as of 1976, maintained "a large and expanding Gross National Product," and argued that the CIA belief that economic chaos hindered the USSR's defenses was a ruse on the part of the USSR. One CIA employee called Team B "a kangaroo court".

Pipes called Team B's evidence "soft." Team B came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several new weapons, featuring a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a system that did not depend on active sonar, and was thus undetectable by existing technology.

According to Pipes, "Team B was appointed to look at the evidence and to see if we could conclude that the actual Soviet strategy is different from ours, i.e. the strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). It has now been demonstrated totally that it was". In 1986, Pipes maintained that Team B contributed to creating more realistic defense estimates.

Writings on Russian history
Pipes wrote many books on Russian history, including Russia under the Old Regime (1974), The Russian Revolution (1990), and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (1994), and was a frequent interviewee in the press on the matters of Soviet history and foreign affairs. His writings also appear in Commentary, The New York Times, and The Times Literary Supplement. At Harvard, he taught large courses on Imperial Russia as well as the Russian Revolution and guided over 80 graduate students to their PhDs.

Pipes is known for arguing that the origins of the Soviet Union can be traced to the separate path taken by 15th-century Muscovy, in a Russian version of the Sonderweg thesis. In Pipes' opinion, Muscovy differed from every other State in Europe in that it had no concept of private property, and that everything was regarded as the property of the Grand Duke/Tsar. In Pipes' view, this separate path undertaken by Russia (possibly under Mongol influence) ensured that Russia would be an autocratic state with values fundamentally dissimilar from those of Western civilization. Pipes argued that this "patrimonialism" of Imperial Russia started to break down when Russian leaders attempted to modernize in the 19th century, without seeking to change the basic "patrimonial" structure of Russian society. In Pipes's opinion, this separate course undertaken by Russia over the centuries made Russia uniquely open to revolution in 1917. Pipes strongly criticized the values of the radical intelligentsia of late Imperial Russia for what he sees as their fanaticism and inability to accept reality. Pipes stressed that the Soviet Union was an expansionist, totalitarian state bent on world conquest. He is also known for the thesis that, contrary to many traditional histories of the Soviet Union at the time, the October Revolution was, rather than a popular general uprising, a coup foisted upon the majority of the Russian population by a tiny segment of the population driven by a select group of intellectuals who subsequently established a one-party dictatorship that was intolerant and repressive from the start.

In what was meant to be an "off-the-record" interview, Pipes told Reuters in March 1981 that "Soviet leaders would have to choose between peacefully changing their Communist system in the direction followed by the West or going to war. There is no other alternative and it could go either way – Détente is dead." Pipes also stated in the interview that Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher of West Germany was susceptible to pressure from the Soviets. It was learned independently that Pipes was the official who spoke to Reuters. This potentially jeopardized Pipes' job. The White House and the "incensed" State Department issued statements repudiating Pipes' statements.

In 1992, Pipes served as an expert witness in the Constitutional Court of Russia's trial of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Reception and criticism
His writing have provoked discussions in the academic community, for example in The Russian Review among several others. Criticism of Pipes's interpretation of the events of 1917 has come mostly from the revisionist school of Soviet experts, who under the influence of the French Annales school, have tended since the 1970s to center their interpretation of the Russian Revolution on social movements from below in preference to parties and their leaders and interpreted political movements as responding to pressures from below rather than directing them. Among members of this school, Lynne Viola and Sheila Fitzpatrick write that Pipes focused too narrowly on intellectuals as causal agents. Peter Kenez, a former PhD student of Pipes', argued that Pipes approached Soviet History as a prosecutor, intent solely on proving the criminal intent of the defendant, to the exclusion of anything else, and described Pipes as a researcher of "great reputation" but with passionate anti-communist views.

Other critics have written that Pipes wrote at length about what Pipes described as Vladimir Lenin's unspoken assumptions and conclusions while neglecting what Lenin actually said. Alexander Rabinowitch writes that whenever a document can serve Pipes' long-standing crusade to demonize Lenin, Pipes commented on it at length; if the document allows Lenin to be seen in a less negative light, Pipes passed over it without comment. Following the demise of the USSR, Pipes charged the revisionists with skewing their research, by means of statistics, to support their preconceived ideological interpretation of events, which made the results of their research  "as unreadable as they were irrelevant for the understanding of the subject" to provide intellectual cover for Soviet terror and acting as simpletons and/or Communist dupes. He also stated that their attempt at "history from below" only obfuscated the fact that "Soviet citizens were the helpless victims of a totalitarian regime driven primarily by a lust for power." Pipes' critics argued that his historical writings perpetuated the Soviet Union as "evil empire" narrative in an attempt "to put the clock back a few decades to the times when Cold War demonology was the norm."

Honors
Pipes had an extensive list of honors, including: Honorary Consul of the Republic of Georgia, Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Learning (PAU), Commander's Cross of Merit of the Republic of Poland, Honorary DHL at Adelphi College, Honorary LLD at Muskingum College, Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Silesia, Szczecin University, and the University of Warsaw. Honorary Doctor of Political Science from the Tbilisi (Georgia) School of Political Studies. Annual Spring Lecturer of the Norwegian Nobel Peace Institute, Walter Channing Cabot Fellow of Harvard University, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Guggenheim Fellow (twice), Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and recipient of the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association. He was a member of the Board of Advisors of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. He served on a number of editorial boards including that of the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence.  He received one of the 2007 National Humanities Medals and in 2009 he was awarded both the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and the Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize by the William & Mary Law School.
In 2010, Pipes received the medal "Bene Merito" awarded by the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs. Since 2010 he belonged to the Russian Valdai Discussion Club.

He was a member of the advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Personal life
Pipes married Irene Eugenia Roth in 1946; the couple had two children, Daniel and Steven. Their son Daniel Pipes is a scholar of Middle Eastern affairs.

Pipes died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on May 17, 2018 at the age of 94.

Works
 
Author
The Formation of the Soviet Union, Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (1954)
Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885–1897 (1963)
Struve, Liberal on the Left (1970)
Europe Since 1815 (1970)
Europe Since 1500 (1971) With J.H. Hexter and A. Molho 
Russia Under the Old Regime (1974)
Soviet Strategy in Europe (1976)
Struve, Liberal on the Right, 1905–1944 (1980)
U.S.-Soviet Relations in the Era of Détente: a Tragedy of Errors (1981)
Survival is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America's Future (1984)
Russia Observed: Collected Essays on Russian and Soviet History (1989)
The Russian Revolution (1990) (Audiobook)
Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime: 1919–1924 (1993)
Communism, the Vanished Specter (1994)
A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (1995)
The Three "Whys" of the Russian Revolution (1995)
Property and Freedom (1999)
Communism: A History (2001) (Audiobook)
Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (2003)
The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia (2003)
Russian Conservatism and Its Critics (2006)
Scattered Thoughts (2010)
Russia's Itinerant Painters (2011)
Uvarov: A Life (2013) (In Russian)
Alexander Yakovlev: The Man Whose Ideas Delivered Russia from Communism (2015)

Editor
The Russian Intelligentsia (1961)
Revolutionary Russia (1968)
The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (1996)

Contributor
"The National Problem in Russia." In: Readings in Russian Civilization (1969)
"The Communist System." In: The Soviet System: From Crisis to Collapse (1995)

Essays
"The Russian Military Colonies, 1810–1831." The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 22, No. 3, September 1950, pp. 205–219. .
"The First Experiment in Soviet National Policy: The Bashkir Republic, 1917-1920." The Russian Review, Vol. 9, No. 4, October 1950, pp. 303–319. . .
"The Trial of Vera Z." Russian History, Vol. 37, No. 1 , 2010, pp. v, vii-x, 1-3, 5-31, 33-49, 51-82. .

Filmography
 War and Peace in the Nuclear Age (documentary mini-series). Episode 12: “Reagan Reagan’s Shield”. WGBH, 1989.
 History’s Mysteries (documentary series). “Killer Submarine”. History Channel, 2001.
 Beyond the Movie - The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. National Geographic, 2003.
 The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (documentary mini-series). Episode 1: “Baby It’s Cold Outside”. Written and directed by Adam Curtis. 2004.

References

Further reading
Bogle, Lori Lyn, "Pipes, Richard", pp. 922–923, in The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing edited by Kelly Boyd, Vol. 2, London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishing, 1999. online
Daly, Jonathan, “The Pleiade: Five Scholars Who Founded Russian Historical Studies in America,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 18, no. 4 (Fall 2017): 785–826.
Daly, Jonathan, ed., Pillars of the Profession: The Correspondence of Richard Pipes and Marc Raeff (Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston, 2019).
 Firestone, Thomas. "Four Sovietologists: A Primer." National Interest No. 14 (Winter 1988/9), pp. 102–107 on the ideas of  Zbigniew Brzezinski, Stephen F. Cohen Jerry F. Hough, and Richard Pipes.
 Malia, Martin Edward, "The Hunt for the True October", pp. 21–28, from Commentary, Vol. 92, 1991.
Pipes, Richard, "Vixi: The Memoirs of a Non-Belonger", 2003.
Poe, Marshall, "The Dissident", Azure (Spring 2008).
Somin, Ilya, "Riddles, Mysteries, and Enigmas: Unanswered Questions of Communism's Collapse", pp. 84–88, from Policy Review, Vol. 70, 1994.
Stent, Angela, "Review of U.S-Soviet Relations in the Era of Détente", pp. 91–92, from Russian Review, Vol. 41, 1982.
Szeftel, Marc, "Two Negative Appraisals of Russian Pre-Revolutionary Development", pp. 74–87, from Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 1980.

External links

 
 

1923 births
2018 deaths
American historians
Polish historians
Polish male non-fiction writers
Cornell University alumni
Muskingum University alumni
Harvard University alumni
Harvard University faculty
Historians of communism
Polish emigrants to the United States
Jewish American historians
American male non-fiction writers
American people of Polish-Jewish descent
Historians of Russia
People from Cieszyn
United States National Security Council staffers
Stalinism-era scholars and writers
United States Army Air Forces soldiers
National Humanities Medal recipients
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Historians of the Soviet Union
The weapons effect is a controversial theory described and debated in the scientific field of social psychology. It refers to the mere presence of a weapon or a picture of a weapon leading to more aggressive behavior in humans, particularly if these humans are already aroused.  This should not be confused with the weapon focus, another social psychology finding. This effect was first described by Leonard Berkowitz and Anthony LePage in 1967 in their paper "Weapons as Aggressions-Eliciting Stimuli" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The paper outlines an experiment conducted by the authors at the University of Wisconsin. The researchers tested their hypothesis that stimuli commonly associated with aggression (like weapons) can elicit more aggressive responses from people "ready to act" aggressively.

It is important to note that several psychology researchers have also criticized the weapons effect, questioning the original research study’s findings. This is because subsequent studies have been less successful at replicating the weapons effect, and alternative explanations have been proposed. For example, more recent research has proposed that there are more factors that influence aggression in a situation containing a weapon, such as an individual's familiarity with the weapons present.

As work with the weapons effect progressed, researchers also demonstrated the weapons priming effect. This variation refers to even weapon-related words leading to more aggressive behavior in humans.

History

Original study

The original study design by Berkowitz and LePage is as follows: The researchers recruited 100 male university students for one in-laboratory session. The students were randomly assigned to receive either 1 shock or 7 shocks, and were told that these shocks came from a peer. Following this, the researchers gave the students the opportunity to administer as many shocks as they wanted to the peer. For about one third of the students, a rifle and revolver were on the table near the shock key; half of these participants were told the weapon belonged to the targeted peer and the other half of these participants were told the weapon did not belong to the targeted peer. For the other two thirds of participants, there was either nothing on the table near the shock key or there was 2 badminton rackets on the table near the shock key. The dependent variable, or outcome measure, was how many shocks the participant administered to the targeted peer.

The researchers found that the greatest number of shocks were administered by the students who had initially received 7 shocks and then were in the presence of the weapons, regardless of whether they were told the weapon belonged to the targeted peer or not. As such, the authors believe this was evidence for their original hypothesis that an aroused person would act more aggressively in the presence of weapons.

Replications and extensions

In 1975, Ann Frodi made an attempt to replicate the original weapons effect study cross-culturally in a Swedish population. In addition, she extended the work to examine other possible stimuli which may have aggressive-stimulating connotations or aggressive-inhibiting connotations. Frodi used a very similar research study design; with a 100 male high school students either heavily angered or not by whom they thought was a peer. Then, participants had the opportunity to administer shocks to this "peer" with either no weapons, weapons, or a baby-bottle (constructed as an aggressive-inhibiting stimuli) on the table near the shock key. Frodi found that the participants exposed to weapons administered the greatest amount of shocks, but unlike the original study Berkowitz and Page study, there was no significant difference in numbers of shocks administered between those who were angered and who were not. Also, Frodi did not find evidence for aggressive-inhibiting stimuli; that is, the control group (with no weapons) and the baby-bottle group did not significantly differ on the number of administered shocks.

In 1993, Arthur Kellermann and colleagues obtained data from police and medical examination records on risk factors in the home of occurring homicides. Information on control subjects (matched to be the same as homicide victims on sex, race, age range, and neighborhood) was also obtained. Using matched-pair methods, the researchers compared risk factors. The researchers found that keeping a gun in the home was strongly and independently related with homicide. However very few of the homicides involved household guns.

Weapons priming effect

In 1998, Craig Anderson and colleagues wanted to further test the mechanism behind the weapons effect. At the time, the current explanation for the weapons effect suggested priming, or that the cognitive identification of weapons automatically increased the accessibility of aggression related thoughts. Thus, the researchers tested if even weapon-related words or images would be followed by speedier oral reading of an aggressive (vs. nonaggressive) word. This was done in two experiments: the first experiment only manipulated weapon-related words in a group of 35 undergraduate students of mixed gender. That is, half the participants saw weapon-related words on what they thought was a computer reading task and the other half saw animal-related words (control). The second experiment manipulated weapon-related images in a group of 93 undergraduate students, with half the participants seeing images of weapons and the other half seeing images of plants. Results confirmed the weapons priming effect hypothesis; even just the presence of weapons-related words or images increased speed in reading of an aggressive word. In addition, the word-prime had a stronger effect than the image-prime.

In 2005, Bartholow and colleagues extended on the weapons priming effect by examining if individual differences in knowledge about guns predicted the strength of the weapons priming effect on aggression-related outcomes. To do this, the researchers conducted three experiments: (1) looking at emotional and cognitive reactions to visual gun cues in hunters (individuals with prior gun experience) and non-hunters, (2) examining reactions to pictures of different gun types (hunting firearms vs. assault firearms) in hunters and non-hunters, and (3) comparing differences in aggressive behavior following weapons primes with differences in emotional and cognitive responses to visual gun cues. Results expanded on the weapons priming effect, finding that hunters reacted to visual gun cues differently depending on the gun type. Also, individual differences in emotional and cognitive responses to gun cues were associated with individual differences in aggressive behavior following a weapons prime.

Criticism

Weak evidence

Besides inspiring a number of replications and extensions, the weapons effect and Berkowitz and LePage’s original study has received major criticism. First, replications have not always found the weapons effect. In 1971, Ellis and colleagues gave 104 subjects the opportunity to shock a confederate (a research assistant who pretends to be another test subject) after receiving no shocks, 2 shocks, or 8 shocks from this confederate. This created angered and non-angered subjects. For some of the subjects weapons were present in the study room; furthermore, researchers told some of the subjects that the confederate was a policeman and researchers told the other group that the confederate was a student. This study did not find weapons to be aggression-eliciting stimuli, with no significant difference in the number of shocks administered among those who had a weapon in the study room and those who did not, regardless of level of shock originally received by the subject. When researchers told the subjects that the confederate was a student, the presence of weapons in the study room in combination with a subject that was not angered at the study onset, inhibited the number of shocks administered. Also, when researchers told the subjects that the confederate was a policeman, the presence of weapons in the study room in combination with a subject that was angered at the study onset, inhibited the amount of shocks the subject administered.

A 1971 study by Page and Scheidt also found that individual differences played a major role in whether or not the weapons effect would be found in a study. Individuals who were more sophisticated presented different data than less sophisticated individuals, or those who were experiencing evaluation apprehension. They also concluded that any weapons effect that was demonstrated could not be generalized outside of a laboratory setting.

Schmidt and Schmidt heavily criticized Berkowitz's theory of weapons as aggression-eliciting stimuli in their article Weapons as Aggression-Eliciting Stimuli: A Critical Inspection of Experimental Results. The authors examined the original weapons effect study and subsequent replications and failed replications, concluding that there was no experimental evidence of a cue-elicited weapons-effect on aggressive behavior. Instead, the authors attribute the occasional observed weapons effect to being a result of operant conditioning.

Reverse weapons effect

In 1991, Gary Kleck and Karen McElrath obtained archival data from 1979-1985 National Crime Surveys and the 1982 Supplementary Homicide Reports. The researchers wanted to examine the impact of firearms and other deadly weapons on: (1) the probability that threatening situations escalated to a physical attack, (2) the probability that injuries resulted from a physical attack, and (3) the probability that death resulted from a physical attack. Results were not consistent with the weapons effect. Instead, the researchers found that the presence of all types of deadly weapons was strongly associated with threatening situations that did escalate to a physical attack. In the case where there was a physical attack and the presence of a weapon, there was also less probability of injury.  Yet, in the case where there was a physical attack, a weapon present, and an injury, there was an increased probability of death. Overall, this data suggests that the weapons effect (if there is indeed a weapons effect) is more nuanced than previously portrayed. Further, that the presence of guns may have had an inhibitory effect on physical violence .

Kleck continued with this line of research, and in 2001 published another study examining this opposition to the weapons effect. Again using archival data, Kleck found that guns have little do with the relative risk of homicide. In his discussion, he bid scholars to question the causal effect of the presence of weapons in the scene on the incidence of homicide.

While it is difficult to directly test the weapons effect in the real world, much of the available evidence would suggest that there are other underlying causes for the effects originally measured by Berkowitz and LePage.

Real-world application

The weapons effect has implications for legal policy on gun control. For example, in a book chapter from Psychology and Social Policy, author Charles Turner proposes that policy recommendations aiming to minimize criminal violence need to take in account that the aggressive meaning people attach to firearms, in addition to the availability of firearms, has an important role in criminal violence. Yet, he also argues that the weapons effect can be mitigated. Nevertheless, with the mixed results and conclusions from weapons effect studies, it is not clear if this line of research will extend into support for or against gun control legislation.

Because of the nature of the weapons effect, it is impossible to directly test the original hypothesis in a real-world setting. While the attempts at replicating or even finding a weapons effect may be performed flawlessly, that does not necessarily mean that the results of these studies is applicable in the real world. It is important to note that an effect may have been found in many of these studies, but further research is necessary to determine the validity and replicability of these results.

See also

Leonard Berkowitz
Weapon focus
Aggression
Social learning theory

References

External links
For a PowerPoint on frameworks for the social psychology of aggression (this includes one slide on the original weapons effect study) see the following website: http://www.slideserve.com/arabella/social-psychology-of-aggression
For CNN's latest coverage on the gun debate see the following website: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/us/gun-debate
For PBS's latest coverage on the gun debate see the following website: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/news/gun-debate/

Social psychology Confrontation analysis (also known as dilemma analysis) is an operational analysis technique used to structure, understand and think through multi-party interactions such as negotiations. It is the underpinning mathematical basis of drama theory. 

It is derived from game theory but considers that instead of resolving the game, the players often redefine the game when interacting. Emotions triggered from the potential interaction play a large part in this redefinition. So whereas game theory looks on an interaction as a single decision matrix and resolves that, confrontation analysis looks on the interaction as a sequence of linked interactions, where the decision matrix changes under the influence of precisely defined emotional dilemmas.

Derivation and use

Confrontation analysis was devised by Professor Nigel Howard in the early 1990s drawing from his work on game theory and metagame analysis. It has been turned to defence, political, legal, financial and commercial  applications.

Much of the theoretical background to General Rupert Smith's book The Utility of Force drew its inspiration from the theory of confrontation analysis.

Confrontation analysis can also be used in a decision workshop as structure to support role-playing for training, analysis and decision rehearsal.

Method 

Confrontation analysis looks on an interaction as a sequence of confrontations. During each confrontation the parties communicate until they have made their positions clear to one another.  These positions can be expressed as a card table (also known as an options board) of yes/no decisions. For each decision each party communicates what they would like to happen (their position) and what will happen if they cannot agree (the threatened future). These interactions produce dilemmas and the card table changes as players attempt to eliminate these.

Consider the example on the right (Initial Card Table), taken from the 1995 Bosnian Conflict. This represents an interaction between the Bosnian Serbs and the United Nations forces over the safe areas. The Bosnian Serbs had Bosniak enclaves surrounded and were threatening to attack.

Each side had a position as to what they wanted to happen:

The Bosnian Serbs wanted (see 4th column):
 To be able to attack the enclaves
 NOT to withdraw their heavy weapons from the enclaves
 For the UN NOT to use air strikes
The UN wanted (See 5th column):
 The Bosnian Serbs NOT to attack the enclaves
 The Bosnian Serbs to withdraw their heavy weapons
 The Bosnian Serbs NOT to take hostages.
If no further changes were made then what the sides were saying would happen was (see 1st column):
The Bosnian Serbs said they would attack the enclaves
The Bosnian Serbs said they would NOT withdraw their heavy weapons
The Bosnian Serbs said they would take hostages if the UN uses air strikes
The UN said it would initiate air strikes.  However the Bosnian Serbs DID NOT BELIEVE them. (Hence the question mark on the Card Table).

Confrontation analysis then specifies a number of precisely defined dilemmas that occur to the parties following from the structure of the card tables.  It states that motivated by the desire to eliminate these dilemmas, the parties involved will CHANGE THE CARD TABLE, to eliminate their problem.

In the situation at the start the Bosnian Serbs have no dilemmas, but the UN has four. It has three persuasion dilemmas in that the Bosnian Serbs are not going to do the three things they want them to (not attack the enclaves, withdraw the heavy weapons and not take hostages). It also has a rejection dilemma in that the Bosnian Serbs do not believe they will actually use the air strikes, as they think the UN will submit to their position, for fear of having hostages taken.

Faced with these dilemmas, the UN modified the card table to eliminate its dilemmas.  It took two actions:

Firstly, it withdrew its forces from the positions where they were vulnerable to being taken hostage.  This action eliminated the Bosnian Serbs' option (card) of taking hostages.

Secondly, with the addition of the Rapid Reaction Force, and in particular its artillery the UN had an additional capability to engage Bosnian Serb weapons; they added the card "Use artillery against Bosnian Serbs". Because of this, the UN's threat of air strikes became more credible.  The situation changed to that of the Second Card Table:

The Bosnian Serbs wanted (see 4th column):
 To be able to attack the enclaves
 NOT to withdraw heavy weapons from the enclaves
 For the UN NOT to use air strikes
 For the UN NOT to use artillery
The UN wanted (See 5th column):
 The Bosnian Serbs NOT to attack the enclaves
 The Bosnian Serbs to withdraw their heavy weapons
If no further changes were made then what the sides were saying would happen was (see 1st column):
The Bosnian Serbs said they would attack the enclaves, but the UN did not believe them.
The Bosnian Serbs said they would NOT withdraw their heavy weapons, but the UN did not believe them.
The UN said it would use artillery.  The Bosnian Serbs believed this.
The UN said it would use air strikes.  This time, however, the Bosnian Serbs believed them.

Faced with this new situation, the Bosnian Serbs modified their position to accept the UN proposal.  The final table was an agreement as shown in the Final Card table (see thumbnail and picture).

Confrontation analysis does not necessarily produce a win-win solution (although end states are more likely to remain stable if they do); however, the word confrontation should not necessarily imply that any negotiations should be carried out in an aggressive way.

The card tables are isomorphic to game theory models, but are not built with the aim of finding a solution. Instead, the aim is to find the dilemmas facing characters and so help to predict how they will change the table itself. Such prediction requires not only analysis of the model and its dilemmas, but also exploration of the reality outside the model; without this it is impossible to decide which ways of changing the model in order to eliminate dilemmas might be rationalized by the characters.

Sometimes analysis of the ticks and crosses can be supported by values showing the payoff to each of the parties.

References

External links
 Dilemmas Galore – A user discussion group.  Deals with applications of Confrontation analysis to current politics, military campaigns, business problems, psychology, etc. Also contains a good introduction and glossary of the terms used in Confrontation Analysis.
Dilemma Explorer - A software application to do Confrontation Analysis
Confrontation Manager — A software application using an earlier version of Confrontation Analysis.
Confronteer an iPhone app to do Confrontation Analysis.
 N. Howard, 'Confrontation Analysis: How to win operations other than war', CCRP Publications, 1999.
 P. Bennett, J. Bryant and N. Howard, 'Drama Theory and Confrontation Analysis' — can be found (along with other recent PSM methods) in: J. V. Rosenhead and J. Mingers (eds) Rational Analysis for a Problematic World Revisited: problem structuring methods for complexity, uncertainty and conflict, Wiley, 2001.
 J. Bryant, The Six Dilemmas of Collaboration: inter-organisational relationships as drama, Wiley, 2003.
 N. Howard, Paradoxes of Rationality', MIT Press, 1971.
 How to structure disputes using Confrontation Analysis contains an illustrated explanation of Confrontation Analysis.
 Speed Confrontation Management a brief "How to" manual on doing Confrontation Analysis without using an Options Table.

Formal sciences
Game theory
Operations research
Problem structuring methods